Making of Order of the Sinking Star: The Game Design Supercollider

Ten years after The Witness, Jonathan Blow and Thekla, Inc. set out to answer an ambitious design question: What happens when you bring together ideas from some of the most brilliant puzzle designers in the industry and put these ideas into one single and massive interconnected universe? It’s a question that led to the game design supercollider that is Order of the Sinking Star: a game that first started as an experiment -- from both a game design but also a custom game programming language perspective with the creation of “Jai”. But then, as this experiment continued, it was transformed into an incredible 10-year puzzle adventure and programming project unlike any other -- born from a desire to push puzzle game design past its traditional limits to create the largest and greatest puzzle game ever made.

What Do You Mean by Game Design Supercollider?

Instead of building from a single core concept, we created a "game design supercollider" – smashing together the ideas from multiple puzzle game designers to create a puzzle landscape that's much more intricate and vast than what has come before – with this game having a combinatoric explosion of possibilities.

Order of the Sinking Star doesn’t just have a single core concept, instead it’s a massive design experiment built in collaboration with an incredible lineup of puzzle designers, which includes but isn’t limited to:

• Jonathan Blow (The Witness, Braid)
• Alan Hazelden (Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, Mirror Isles)
• Sean Barrett (Promesst 1-3)
• Jonah Ostroff (the Heroes of Sokoban series)
• Patrick Traynor (Patrick’s Parabox)
• Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure)
• Zach Polansky (Enigmash)
• and several others!

How Does Everything Come Together?

Rather than having isolated worlds, we built a system where distinct mechanical philosophies collision-test against one another:

• Four Realms, Distinct Rules: You begin by exploring four separate domains, each with their own distinct puzzle mechanics/abilities to master, characters to meet, and secrets waiting to be uncovered.
• Emergent Crossovers: As you venture deeper and continue to uncover the secrets of the Order of the Sinking Star, the worlds as you know them begin to combine. Abilities learned in one realm suddenly are shared with another, characters from the North end up meeting characters from other locations, and so much more.

For Order of the Sinking Star, what first seems to be four individual core concept ideas, ends up turning into a massive array of surprising new gameplay possibilities and hundreds of hours of gameplay! It’s a game design supercollider that makes the game a mysterious, living puzzle adventure unlike any other.

What About Jai?

There’s so much to cover when it comes to Jai, the new programming language Jonathan Blow created and that he and his team have used for the development of Order of the Sinking Star. If you’re interested, we encourage you to check out Jonathan’s previous panels where he covered details about Jai.

We know many of you programmers out there are curious if you can get your hands on Jai -- we’re happy to re-confirm that not too long after the game releases, focus will switch to the compiler, working first toward a binary release, then, eventually a source release.

What Blog’s Next?

Check back soon for Part 2 of our Making of, where we sit down with our art and audio leads to talk about how we forged the visual and acoustic atmosphere of Order of the Sinking Star!

WISHLIST & FOLLOW

With the game’s release date announced, now there’s just one thing left to do: wait for it to launch!

Be sure to wishlist and follow the game on Steam, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 to get notified immediately when the game’s available to purchase, and follow our social channels to stay up to date on the latest news for Order of the Sinking Star.

Follow & Wishlist on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/499170/Order_of_the_Sinking_Star/
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