American developer Jonathan Blow is releasing his ten-year puzzle project, The Order of the Sinking Star, on Thursday. The massive game features roughly 1,500 puzzles across four overhead worlds and requires an estimated 500 hours to complete, running entirely on a custom programming language built from scratch.
Jonathan Blow spent ten years crafting The Order of the Sinking Star alongside a small team at Thekla, Inc., a decade after the release of The Witness.
Four Overhead Worlds Combine Fifteen Hundred Puzzles
The project functions like a game design supercollider
, taking mechanics from four pre-existing free puzzle games by other creators and smashing them together with permission.
One world borrows from Alan Hazelden’s 2014 game Mirror Isles, where players swap positions across islands using mirror reflections. That system merges with the mechanics of Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, another free game by Hazelden that involves throwing stones into water to form pathways. With roughly 1,500 puzzles packed into the experience, Blow estimates that completing the entire game could take approximately 500 hours.
Developer Writes Custom Programming Language Called Jai
Blow refused to compromise on any part of the production, deciding to write his own programming language named Jai from scratch.
I do want the next project after this to be less on hard mode, or really it was nightmare mode, because we did so many things on hard mode at the same time.
Jonathan Blow, Developer via BBC
He paired this custom language with a bespoke game engine rather than turning to pre-built industry standards like Unity or Unreal Engine. Creating a custom engine allowed him to shape graphics rendering, physics simulation, and scripting into software tuned and authored very specifically
to his creative vision. He acknowledged that the massive technical undertaking turned what began as a simple design experiment
into a ten-year development cycle.
Creator Defends Bad Business Decisions for Unique Design
Reflecting on his latest release, he noted that commercial practicality rarely dictates his creative choices, having previously criticized titles like Farmville and World of Warcraft.
I sort of make bad business decisions in a sense…because I let the design dominate that process. But then because we did that, we always have something unique.
Jonathan Blow, Developer via Yahoo
He chose to leave AI not part of the pipeline at all
for his team. He also expressed concern that heavy reliance on automated coding tools might leave future creators without a fundamental understanding of programming.