Development of the game, Limbo

Peter discusses the game, Limbo

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/limbo-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Peter: My name is Peter and I’m a level designer and scripter of Limbo.

Interviewer: What’s Limbo about?

Peter: It’s a huge experience. We want to make a huge impact on people with it, and our director he wanted this world where you didn’t know what to expect. So, that’s why we’ve kept everything unique, and you’re never going to run into a thing twice. Everything is a new, unique experience.

Interviewer: What was the motivation behind the design, behind actually getting started and how did you develop this game?

Peter: OK. I’ve been on the team for two years. It’s the concept of this little boy being stuck in this odd world where nothing is safe. That was already pinned down before I got hired. So, we did we started out prototyping some of the puzzles because Limbo is about a lot of puzzles, about a kid getting stuck and we keep things simple. We really stuck to that. We have had a lot of iterations on every puzzle, and I think we’ve cut maybe 90 percent of all the puzzles we actually did. So, we actually have a whole new folio for a whole new game if we want to do that. But, keep it simple, that’s our design philosophy for all the things in the game.

Interviewer: As you were developing it and play testing it, did you run into any issues? What are the things that you had to change to make it more accessible?

Peter: Well, again, simplicity is definitely one of them. I said that already, but on the early stage we’re not sure whether we should empower the main protagonist of the game, the boy, with some other abilities because right now he can only push things. And he can grab things and then he can jump and run. That is it. So, that’s all the tools you have to play the game, mechanics-wise. Then we’ll relay that a lot on the physics.

So, in this game we tried like – OK, maybe, you want to give him tools. So, he could throw stones. So, he could influence the other physics in the world, and we were working a lot with that trying to come up with puzzles, and we had it working and there were design issues like how many rocks would he be able to throw. Where would he get them from and all this stuff? And then, we just decided we wanted to make the fun puzzles, and then we decided what to do to get the stones and all these questions get answered.

We ended up we just couldn’t find good puzzles with this mechanic of the game, so we cut it off and we just kept to the core thing that we really like. So, that is, using the boy’s very advanced tool for solving some pretty advanced puzzles as well.

Interviewer: You said you’re the level designer of the game. So, was the level design for this game different than any other designing levels for other games? How so?

Peter: OK. What I had been working on earlier, I only had been working professionally on one other title which was a point-and-click adventure game for kids. This is totally different. We have different types of people designing different type of puzzles in the game. So, the lead designer, he’s been very much on all the very logic-based puzzles that require a lot of thinking where I’ve been pushing some of the action-based platforming into it because one of my favorite games is Crash Bandicoot. That’s where I started out.

So, you’ll see a good mix of that and in some of the puzzles you actually have to use the speed and the agility and – what do you call like – the torque senses of your body. You have to be pretty fast together with being clever and figure out a puzzle. So, that was my role. I actually put in some of the action and leveling out all of it because you don’t want to be stuck all the time. You want to feel like you’re alive and in this world and progressing, not stuck all the time.

Interviewer: Based on your experience in this project, how are you going to be developing and designing games differently in the future?

Peter: Well, we are definitely going to… Midway through the project we started a new technology. It’s not new technology for us because it’s our own engine. So, we had this branching system so we could put a puzzle in a branch, and then we could move that puzzle around as much as we wanted. So, we had all these puzzles that didn’t have any setting, any sound, nothing. It just had the core mechanics, like boxes and levers and whatever was needed to make the puzzle.

So, what we could do was switch them around and see what fit. This puzzle had water. This one had a log-looking thing in it or, maybe, it had advanced technology so buttons, for instance. We introduced buttons in the game later on when you get a lamp or something. We kind of figured out a narrative we wanted to tell, and then we could put it in like how the puzzles fit into that.

Actually, when I got hired there, they had a huge poster on the wall, right? That poster pictured the whole world of Limbo, like was that all about. That was like the water world where there had to be physics. So, you needed physics to do the water, and we had the city where there’s a junk yard and junk yard monsters and all different, all these things from this one poster with all the different areas of Limbo.

Initially, we just got to all the cool stuff. It emerged from some of the certain areas, so we had this vision of a shore. You just wanted to go to the some edge of the world where the ocean started. But, we couldn’t come up with anything that fit into that, so we ended up focusing more on some of the things that really worked for us. So, you’ll go through very, very different environments, and you can, hopefully, see that the puzzles in those environments fit very, very well because of the way we iterated, meshed how we wanted the progression together with the puzzle. We actually had in hand good puzzles.

Interviewer: You guys were nominated for Excellence in Visual Art and Technical Excellence. Why do you think that is?

Peter: I think technically we are.

Interviewer: You guys won those awards, too.

Peter: We did and we’re very, very thankful for that. They are going to mean a lot to us in the initial release of the game this summer. Excellence in Technicality, I think that was based on two things, mainly, that the boy, the way he is – I’m not a tech guy – the way his skeleton animation blended in with the physics of the world is amazing. We got three previews of the game. They know, I think, what we hope for with the experience, and they see this boy alive in this game. It’s only 2D and it’s black and white. So, we had to make him alive with a lot of tools. That is one thing.

The other thing is the use of physics. You see, we used physics in here like, I guess, none other platform has used it before. You’ve seen it somewhere, but it’s a different way of doing it. I think that’s why the judges put us in there for and why we won. I think we haven’t showed all of that yet, but in a month or so we’re going to release a video and I think it’s going to show in there. We’ll see.

The visual, I don’t know. It speaks totally for itself. So, people should check out screen shots or whatever and see that, but the black and white and we’ve got a lot of inspiration from old movies and all that stuff, film noir, but they both showed definitely.

Again, we’re here at the IGF and we’re surrounded by a lot of cool other games. Actually, we’re next to Owl Boy and Shank which are also nominated for visual art, and I think those are stunning. But each year the judges probably fall for something, and this year it was good that it was us.

Interviewer: So what are you guys going to do next on this game? Are you going to pursue it more? What are the plans for the studio?

Peter: The plans for the studio is that we like our size, so we want to keep the size. We want to make a game that we can do with the size. We’re not going to expand and do a AAA game or MMO or whatever.

Interviewer: Sure.

Peter: So, we want to keep something we know we can do. What you can see in here is that we can do puzzle gaming. We can do a lot of emotional impact on people with the sound we do and the visuals. But then again, we’ve been working on this for a long time, so at the same time we really want to do something else that’s unique. So, we’re going to be pursuing those thoughts a lot during the next few months because now we’re still publishing on the gold release for this one because it’s going out this summer.

Interviewer: Where is it going to be available, on what platform?

Peter: It is going to be available this summer exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade. That’s a bit sad because we really want as many people as possible to play it, but there’s no doubt that when it has been launched and the launch has settled and all that, we want to be looking into what is the other options. And I think in the future other people would be able to be playing it somewhere else.

Interviewer: Where is the website that listeners can go to to just find out more information about the game?

Peter: I think the best thing that people can do is to visit limbogame.org which is not a very prosperous website because there’s like only this little Flash video that spoofs our concept video, but you can sign up for a newsletter there. What we’re going to do from now on until launch, we’re going to be feeding people who like the game and sign up and all of that with a little bit on the way so we can keep them interested and show them what we really love about the game. So, it is going to be a game playing video, of course, and later more videos because there’s going to be more people previewing the game and all that. So, there’s probably going to be some good videos out there showing what the game is all about.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.