Despite its modest size, Playdead is one of the most recognisable studios in the region, having shot to prominence – and financial independence – with its haunting, monochrome XBLA adventure Limbo. The expanding team has recently moved to larger offices and is currently working on the follow-up to its wildly successful debut, a platform adventure simply known as Project 2 at this point. A small contingent of the team has spent the past year working on an iPad port of Limbo, too. We talk to the founders, creative director Arnt Jensen and studio director Dino Patti, about the challenge of porting a game that helped define one platform to another, and the importance of taking your time.
The iPad version of Limbo feels like a natural fit. Was it difficult to get the controls just right?
AJ: Getting the controls right has been the challenge. We’ve been talking about doing the iPad version more or less since we launched Limbo, but I was really scared about having to use virtual controls. We only got started when I had an idea for how we could make an intuitive touch control scheme, but we talked about it for a year before we decided to make that a priority.
DP: The other issue was getting the graphics right.
AJ: At some points we’ve got 70 layers going on, and this can be a challenge for any platform!
So is it running on the same engine as the Xbox version?
AJ: It’s still our engine but we’ve been optimising it constantly.
DP: That engine maxed out the 360 and ran at 30fps. But we got it running at 60fps on the iPad in the end.
That sounds like a lot of work to port a relatively small game.
DP: We always want to make a proper port. We hate it when others do it poorly.
AJ: If it didn’t sell, we would start blaming ourselves for not doing a proper job – and that would be the worst thing. We always wanted it perfect. I don’t think people know how much effort we put into our stuff because every time that we did a relaunch on a platform, the people expect us to have done more levels and extra content, but it would take us forever to do that. We were working for half a year just to get the controls right!
You’ve switched to Unity for your new project. How did you find the transition from bespoke engine to prefab?
AJ: There are good and bad aspects. We have the source code for the engine so we’re making a lot of modifications to make our pipeline easier and faster, but it has been really great to have this huge fundament for every console. We don’t have to think about anything – we almost just push a button and then it’s out on Xbox, PlayStation or whatever. That’s pretty cool, I think.
DP: We’re still at the mercy of Unity’s decisions, which is scary from a business perspective, but I’m pretty sure that if they don’t make something we need we’ll make it ourselves.
AJ: I think in the long run it’s a good decision for us, especially with such a small team, because it’s a really big effort to make your own engines.
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