Limbo is a puzzle/platform game created by Playdead and released for Xbox Live Arcade in 2010. In a interview at IGN, Arnt Jansen, the designer of the game, makes some interesting observations about the development of Limbo:
“I think we ditched seventy percent of our ideas,” Jensen said. “Mainly because it looked too much like something else, was too big a cliché.
One thing I noticed in playing through the game is the shift from heavily scripted events in the beginning (e.g. the constant presence of other children, the emergence of the spider, the dashes over collapsing terrain) to a more lonely and puzzle-centric second half of the game. “Maybe I’m picking at a wound,” I told Jensen when I asked if this shift was intentional.
“It’s a big wound,” he said, looking into his lap and smiling to himself. This wasn’t, in fact, the plan.
“I think I was a lot more involved in the first half of it,” Jensen said. “It was before [puzzle designer] Jebbe started doing more of those hardcore puzzles. I think it was much more about feelings and doing small stories. You were supposed to meet the spider in the gravity puzzles. It was just really hard to pull off and we were too small a team to make it. I had some crazy ideas, some big ideas.”
Also,in the screenshots and in the video below we can see the 2006 concept version.
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