Cocoon is the puzzle aficionado’s delight. The isometric journey from Geometric Interactive marries pared-down gameplay with a mind-bending premise the place gamers bounce between worlds nestled inside orbs. Polygon spoke to designer and director Jeppe Carlsen about the making of this world’s curious puzzles. In that dialog, he revealed that for Cocoon, making the hard-to-beat puzzles got here simply. Making the straightforward ones, on the different hand? That was the problem.
In Cocoon, you management a tiny bug who navigates a darkish twisting sci-fi world that blends insectoid natural matter with industrial worlds. The recreation just about presents the participant with puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. Carlsen informed Polygon that whereas gamers would possibly count on difficult, multi-step puzzles to be the greatest problem for designers, the reverse is usually the case.
“Sometimes the puzzles that when you play, feel very elaborate and complex and like, ‘Whoa, how could someone even like design this?’ They’re not necessarily the ones that took a lot of iteration time,” he mentioned to Polygon in a latest video name.
Early on in the recreation, when gamers arrive at the industrial world for the first time, there’s a easy puzzle. In it, the participant encounters two rotating doorways and two switches. In the last model of the recreation, all you might want to do is use the orb on each switches to line up the doorways in order that there’s a spot you possibly can stroll by. The answer is so easy that Carlsen describes it as “barely” being a puzzle, saying that it’s extra like an interplay. As it seems, it was certainly one of the most complex puzzles to design in the whole recreation.
“That puzzle has [been] iterated so many times, and it is literally the simplest thing in the world. It’s ridiculous. To begin with, the puzzle had different logic for the rotating doors — a bit similar, but different. So at that time, when you put on the switch, both of the doors rotated, and when you let go, you had to let go so that the doors put a line in the middle. Apparently, people found that extremely difficult. They would play the game for seven minutes or something.”
But Carlsen didn’t need that puzzle to be tough. He simply wished gamers to proceed by the world as regular, with out operating into a lot complexity instantly. He informed Polygon that the puzzle simply wasn’t fascinating sufficient to necessitate it being such a problem for gamers, so the crew revised it.
“This [puzzle] has been through so many iterations of different tactics for the doors and different variations of the same puzzle. It took a very long time. And then I thought I had it, but then I couldn’t develop it, and like just — so many versions of rotating doors. It became almost like a production joke about those rotating doors. They worked out eventually, though.”
It looks like all the door iterations have been price it, as Polygon’s overview described the recreation as being, “impossibly good.” Cocoon is out now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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