Today, on Game Life, we're talking

to legendary indy game designer, Jonathan Blow.

JB! I don't know why I said that.

Welcome to the Game Life video podcast.

We have an extra special guest for you today.

It's very true. It is the creator

of beloved indy game Braid, and, also,

creator of forthcoming puzzle-adventure game, The Witness.

Jonathan Blow is here with us.

Thanks for having me on.

So, we still know so little about The Witness.

What we do know: it's a first-person,

very atmospheric puzzle game, but I'm curious

where the real birth of this game was.

It's inspired by Myst and the whole lineage of games

that Myst kind of kicked off, and so the idea was

to take the best parts of a game like Myst,

so the atmosphere and the mood and just that setting

of you're in a place and you have all the time

that you need to figure things out,

and to bring a modern game design sensibility to it,

and what it ends up being is not, so much,

an adventure game, but like a hybrid,

a first-person exploration with puzzles,

like more abstract puzzles.

There really is pretty close to no action in The Witness,

and it's not because I think action's bad,

it's just that so many games do it.

There's two different things that happen

when a game wants to provide difficulty,

and one way hearkens back to arcades,

where it was all action-y, right?

Space Invaders, or Pac-Man,

or whatever is all about moving fast,

and the other way is then RPGs came around,

and it was about making appropriate tactical decisions.

And those are the two ways that we know,

in video games, of how to be challenging,

and it doesn't seem like very much.

It doesn't seem like a very broad pallet.

So while you may expand in the future,

for now, the PS4 is the home console

that you'll be launching on, also PC and ioses

as we've talked about. Yeah.

But what was behind that? Why Sony?

Braid started with Microsoft. Well, there's a lot of,

so, for a while, the development cycle

of the Witness has stretched onward.

When I originally announced the game,

I said it was gonna be Winter 2011, or something,

and it hasn't made that release date,

but that's been for good reasons.

It's because we've seen an opportunity

to make a game that's bigger in scope

where the world is richer, that looks nicer,

and so we're taking that opportunity,

but part of what that means is

that earlier business plans get invalidated,

so we originally thought, okay, we're gonna try

and do PC and PS3 or Xbox, which would have made

a lot of sense in 2011, but then we just took long enough

developing the game that it's, like, hey, new console time,

and it made it easier, so then it came down to,

well, there's these two consoles.

I kind of know more about one, because Sony's been

very proactive about working with indys.

And that can't be overstated.

I mean, last year, Unfinished Swan

and Papo and Yo and Journey, and they really have changed

their stance on nurturing them.

Yeah, so back last year, they invited

a bunch of indys out, and there were 50 of us

in a room getting this serious tech briefing,

and I don't think either Nintendo

or Microsoft would have done that.

Right. I wouldn't expect Sony

to have done that. That's impressive.

During that meeting, I said,

Okay, this is interesting. I want a dev kit, now.

And then they got me one very soon after that.

Yeah, and there you go, it's just making

that outreach and getting you interested

that can go a long way. Totally.

Thanks, Jonathan. Jonathan Blow has been here with us.

Please be sure to check out our other videos with Jonathan,

and Veronica Belmont, who's gonna be joining us

as we sit down to talk about what always on really means,

the future generation of consoles, and what the challenges

of developing for those consoles are.

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