"For many independent developers, of course, spending nine years on a single game idea is an unthinkable luxury. Financial constraints mean many game ideas have to be shipped "as soon as you get to the point where it's fun and shippable," Blow said, leading to games that "kind of converge to a certain level of complexity and then stop there.""
"But thanks to the sales success of The Witness-which reportedly grossed over $5 million in just its first week -Blow said he and his team have had the freedom to spend years "generat[ing] this giant space that's much more complex than where you go with a typical puzzle game... When we create that much possibility, we feel like we have to explore it. Otherwise we're not doing our duty as designers and correctly pursuing this agenda of design research.""
"Blow also said the size of this project helped get him past his general distaste for playtesting, which he said he was "not that big on" for his previous games. "Even The Witness didn't have that much play testing, because I always felt like that was a way to make games a little more generic or something, you know? Like playtesters have complaints and then you file down the complaints and then you get a generic game.""
Financial limitations compel many independent developers to ship games once they reach a fun, shippable state, which often caps a project's complexity. Significant sales from The Witness granted Blow's team the financial freedom to spend years expanding and exploring a much larger puzzle space. The expanded scope required deeper exploration to realize emergent possibilities and fulfill a research-oriented design agenda. Prolonged immersion in the project made playtesting necessary despite prior resistance, since outside perspectives reveal gaps not apparent to the creator. Years of development reduced earlier perfectionism but preserved a drive to produce something notably high quality.
Read at Ars Technica
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