Limbo level designer talks puzzles

Who Was There: Jeppe Carlsen is the lead level designer for Playdead, the Copenhagen-based studio behind the recent downloadable platform game Limbo. The studio's first game kicked off Microsoft's Summer of Arcade lineup to rave reviews. With the game having been available on Xbox Live for a few weeks now, Carlsen attended Game Developers Conference Europe to dissect the game's puzzles and talk about what he learned from the project.

What He Talked About: Carlsen started his session by being upfront about his lack of experience before working on Limbo. "I have no history as a game designer," he said, with his experience being mainly in computer science and then game programming. He was also quick to address interest in the game making it to other formats, saying, "for now at least, it's exclusive [to the Xbox 360]."

As the primary arbiter behind the game's traps and puzzles, though, Carlsen was well placed to dissect the memorable challenges in the game. "We don't want to help the player," he explained, talking about the numerous tricky obstacles in Limbo. "We want him to figure it out on his own. We really want the player to die a lot in the game."

Carlsen's fascination with death was apparent from the numerous video clips that he showed of Limbo's protagonist getting sliced and diced in the game. "I don't know what is wrong with people, but they do enjoy this cute little character dying in a variety of ways," he joked. "Death suits the tone of the game," he posited. "It's a very nice contrast to the otherwise very calm aesthetics of the game."

According to Carlsen, though, the game was play-tested to death to ensure that while players will die a lot, they'll also remain motivated to finish. "We always ensure that the saves are placed so that the player doesn't need to repeat a puzzle." A simple control system was also key to the accessibility of the game; not that this stopped experienced gamers experimenting beyond the simple two-button control scheme. "What we found is that most players would press every button on the pad. You're often completely blind to all the ideas the player might take," he said.

Takeaway: The key to the success of Limbo's puzzles, at least according to Carlsen, is that they should tax the brain but be physically easy to overcome. "The solution should be easy to execute. Wrong approaches should be clearly not possible," he argued. He summed up the experience with this poetic summary: "If you are stuck at a puzzle in the game, then you are stuck in Limbo."