The winged protagonist carefully places the orange orb, which instantly produces a rippling puddle beneath it. Trotting over to a second sphere – turquoise this time – our insectoid hero gently lifts it onto its back and carries it over to the first. What happens next is the most mesmerising three seconds of videogame you’ll see in 2023. Those wings flutter excitedly in anticipation, the puddle suddenly evaporating as the bug leaps and circles the central orb, like a satellite drawn into its orbit. The camera, positioned above, zooms in for a closer look as the orb opens up and the bug spirals into it, descending at great velocity until it touches down with a thump. You’ve entered one world, with another borne on your shoulders.
This exhilarating transition serves the central hook of Cocoon, from Jeppe Carlsen, lead gameplay designer for Playdead’s multiaward-winning Limbo and Inside (a fact shrewdly highlighted by publisher Annapurna Interactive in the game’s debut trailer). The idea originated once Carlsen’s work on Inside was over – before the game was shipped, but after it was content-complete. At the time, he was working on a small game called Thoth, but the concept for Cocoon was nonetheless firmly in his thoughts. “It was this idea of basically: what if levels were also objects that I could pick up?”
This, Carlsen says, was the “starting seed” for the game. “As a gameplay guy, for me it always starts with mechanics. It was just one of those ideas that, every time I thought about it, something new came up and all the puzzle pieces sort of fitted together even better than they did before. And then a month later or whatever, I’m discussing this idea with a friend or someone at a family party – whoever wants to listen – and then suddenly another idea made it click even more.” Eventually, he teamed up with audio designer Jakob Schmid, another Playdead alumnus, and within three months Carlsen had more than an hour’s worth of game that “proved the entire concept”.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1686816559/articles/WTbrvrM951686828096176/8881618129.jpg]
The two had previously been university friends, later reuniting when Schmid joined Playdead when the studio was hiring for an audio programming position just before development began on Inside, where he worked with audio sound designer and composer Martin Stig Andersen. But Carlsen says that Cocoon’s origins stretch back even farther, when the two did their master’s thesis in computer science together. “It’s a very computer science-y kind of idea,” Schmid grins. “Yeah, it is,” Carlsen adds. “From the get-go, it’s about recursions, and what if the world you explore is like a tree structure of worlds within worlds?”
Carlsen began to put it all together in his mind, but to begin with these worlds were “just different-coloured labyrinths”. It wasn’t long before he thought it might be better “to place it in a slightly more ‘real’ setting, so to speak”. Or less abstract, at least: certainly these alien domains, with their biomechanical occupants and apparatus, convince as worlds rather than labyrinths. They’re naturally brighter and more colourful than the settings of Limbo and Inside (though the second features heavy downpours) but still vaguely threatening, and since – for the most part – you’re not equipped with any weapons and are often dwarfed by your environment, you’re made to feel rather vulnerable.
That’s certainly the case when enemies and hazards come into play: in one memorable instance, you’re invited to dive into a world and back out again to avoid trouble, while you’ll face off against large guardians whose attacks can be used against them. These feel more like puzzles than fights, we observe. “Yeah, the whole core concept is very puzzly by nature,” Carlsen says, and just as we’re thinking about another series you could describe thus, he almost immediately brings it up. “At some point, it became: OK, what if we have six Zelda dungeons in a Zelda game, but each of them you can also pick up and carry on your back and you can jump into all these Zelda dungeons? But also within each dungeon, there’s a boss and you get powerups and all that. So I started structuring it a little bit more like Zelda in my mind.”
When you’re not inside them, the orbs have different abilities that allow you to traverse a large hub environment, echoing Metroid as much as Zelda: the orange variant is used to highlight invisible platforms and bridges, while the aqua-coloured sphere lets you pass up and down watery columns, which solidify once you’re out the other side. Sometimes they’re interchangeable, used to activate pressure plates or to trigger devices. It’s all so intuitive that it’s p...
This exhilarating transition serves the central hook of Cocoon, from Jeppe Carlsen, lead gameplay designer for Playdead’s multiaward-winning Limbo and Inside (a fact shrewdly highlighted by publisher Annapurna Interactive in the game’s debut trailer). The idea originated once Carlsen’s work on Inside was over – before the game was shipped, but after it was content-complete. At the time, he was working on a small game called Thoth, but the concept for Cocoon was nonetheless firmly in his thoughts. “It was this idea of basically: what if levels were also objects that I could pick up?”
This, Carlsen says, was the “starting seed” for the game. “As a gameplay guy, for me it always starts with mechanics. It was just one of those ideas that, every time I thought about it, something new came up and all the puzzle pieces sort of fitted together even better than they did before. And then a month later or whatever, I’m discussing this idea with a friend or someone at a family party – whoever wants to listen – and then suddenly another idea made it click even more.” Eventually, he teamed up with audio designer Jakob Schmid, another Playdead alumnus, and within three months Carlsen had more than an hour’s worth of game that “proved the entire concept”.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1686816559/articles/WTbrvrM951686828096176/8881618129.jpg]
The two had previously been university friends, later reuniting when Schmid joined Playdead when the studio was hiring for an audio programming position just before development began on Inside, where he worked with audio sound designer and composer Martin Stig Andersen. But Carlsen says that Cocoon’s origins stretch back even farther, when the two did their master’s thesis in computer science together. “It’s a very computer science-y kind of idea,” Schmid grins. “Yeah, it is,” Carlsen adds. “From the get-go, it’s about recursions, and what if the world you explore is like a tree structure of worlds within worlds?”
Carlsen began to put it all together in his mind, but to begin with these worlds were “just different-coloured labyrinths”. It wasn’t long before he thought it might be better “to place it in a slightly more ‘real’ setting, so to speak”. Or less abstract, at least: certainly these alien domains, with their biomechanical occupants and apparatus, convince as worlds rather than labyrinths. They’re naturally brighter and more colourful than the settings of Limbo and Inside (though the second features heavy downpours) but still vaguely threatening, and since – for the most part – you’re not equipped with any weapons and are often dwarfed by your environment, you’re made to feel rather vulnerable.
That’s certainly the case when enemies and hazards come into play: in one memorable instance, you’re invited to dive into a world and back out again to avoid trouble, while you’ll face off against large guardians whose attacks can be used against them. These feel more like puzzles than fights, we observe. “Yeah, the whole core concept is very puzzly by nature,” Carlsen says, and just as we’re thinking about another series you could describe thus, he almost immediately brings it up. “At some point, it became: OK, what if we have six Zelda dungeons in a Zelda game, but each of them you can also pick up and carry on your back and you can jump into all these Zelda dungeons? But also within each dungeon, there’s a boss and you get powerups and all that. So I started structuring it a little bit more like Zelda in my mind.”
When you’re not inside them, the orbs have different abilities that allow you to traverse a large hub environment, echoing Metroid as much as Zelda: the orange variant is used to highlight invisible platforms and bridges, while the aqua-coloured sphere lets you pass up and down watery columns, which solidify once you’re out the other side. Sometimes they’re interchangeable, used to activate pressure plates or to trigger devices. It’s all so intuitive that it’s p...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2023