Comparrison 2

Limbo is an puzzle-platformer game developed by the danish company Playdead Studios. The game is a 2D side scroller with a inovative physics system that can control the environment and that player character. Arnt Jenson, Playdead's game director, came up with the idea in 2004, he was working as a concept artist at IO Interactive at the time and had become dissatisfied with the corporate nature of the company. He had sketched a 'mood image' of a 'secret place' in order to get ideas, this resulted in something similar to the backgrounds seen in the final game. Jensen was inspired to expand on this idea. He tried to program the game on his own on Visual Basic but discovered that he needed more help and created an art style trailer by 2006. He had initially intended to use the trailer as a way of trying to recruit a programmer to help him. However the trailer got much attention from across the internet and he eventually met Dino Patti who become the co-founder of Playdead. Patti helped Jensen initially with the programming but it became clear that the project was becoming much too large for the two to handle and Patti developed the buisness around the games expanded development.

Initial development was at first funded personally by both Jensen and Patti along with Danish government grants, including those from the Nordic Game Program. Larger investors were sort later in the development cycle but Jensen and Patti did not want to commit to any major publishers as they wanted to maintain full creative control over the project. The game was initailly planed to be a free Microsoft Windows title but by this point jensen and Patti decided to make the game a retail title. Playdead chose to ignore outside advice from investors and critics alike during the development stages. Some of the advice was to add multiplayer, adjustable level difficulty and to make the game longer. However Playdead felt that by adding these options, they would be breaking the integrity of Jensen's original vision. 

Numerous iterations of the game took place during a two-and-a-half year development cycle including changes that jensen had demanded to polish the title. Patti stated that they 'trashed 70%' of the content they had developed, due to it not fitting well with the context of the game. The Core development team consisted of about 8 programmers and was expanded to 16 at various stages with freelancers. The design tools for Limbo were developed in visual studio. Patti commented that they would likely seek third-third party support given the challenges in creating their own technology.

 Jensen set out three goals for the final product. The first was to create a specific mood and art style. Jensen wanted to create an aesthetic for the game without resorting to 3D models and instead using a minimilistic style to allow development to focus more on the gameplay. The second goal was to only require two controls - jumpin and grabbing - outside of the normal left-and-right movement controls. This was to keep the gameplay easy. Finally the finished game was to present no tutorial to the player. The game was purposely developed to not reveal details of it's content other than the tag line. The games audio was created by Martin Stig Anderson, a graduate with specialization in acousmatic music. Anderson sought to create a non-traditional acousmatic music exclusively incorporating the sound effects of the games environments. For example; The electrical noises while in the presence of the ruined 'HOTEL' sign.

The game was designed to avoid the pitfalls of major titles where the gameplay mechanic is used repeatedly. Carlsen, initially brought onboard as a programmer for the custom game engine, became lead designer after Playdead found him capable at creating puzzles. The puzzles were designed to 'keep you guessing all the way through.' The puzzles were designed to feel like a natural part of the games environment to avoid the feeling that the player was simply moving from puzzle to puzzle thoughout the course of the game. The team developed the puzzles by first assuming the player was their 'worst enemy' and made the puzzles as devious as possible but then scaled back their difficulty or added visual and audible aids as if the player was their friend.

Playdead included gruesome death sequences to highlight incorrect solutions and discourage the players from repeating their mistakes. While they expected players to run into numerous deaths while trying solutions, Carlsen stated that their goal was to ensure death wasn't a penalty in the game and made the death animatons entertaining to keep player interested.