That’s how it started.
“I don’t remember the exact context or what triggered it.
And it’s possible for you to carry that around.
And you might put these levels into each other.
“There was just that thought.”
It stayed with the designer, and he soon mentioned it to his friends.
The idea fascinated them, much like it did him.
Worlds within worlds, what could that be?
But despite Carlsen’s clear fascination, development on Cocoon did not start straight away.
However, this idea was simply one that he could not let go of.
It kept coming back to him time and time again, refusing to stay quiet.
But, even with this ever-growing idea, it was still a daydream.
There were no notes and nothing was written down.
It was all just up there, swirling around like a cocktail in Carlsen’s mind.
We had none of that, only just the mechanics.”
This led them to create a prototype for the game.
Work on the game continued.
The team soon brought on Erwin Kho to be art director on the project.
Instead, the narrative is provided by the environment around the player, and the sounds they can hear.
This leaves the story wide open for interpretation.
Each person experiencing the game is able to imprint their own thoughts and feelings into it.
I ran this narrative by others who had also finished the game.
Our stories were not the same.
“For us, we had lots of discussions about ‘why is this character doing all these things?
‘,” Kho tells me.
Who are you in relation to the puzzles that you awake in front of the orbs?’
But this did not matter.
- I think, mission accomplished," Carlsen says.
He could use this to influence his work without it ever being explicitly stated.
That also evolved over time," he says.
“There’s this beautiful tension between the natural rock and then the artificial involvement of the human hand.
But it’s not something that we’re really familiar with,” he tells me.
Like, how beautiful and how amazing is this?"
“Jakob has this interesting approach where he has made all the sound effects with a synthesiser.
There’s no recorded sounds in the game.
There’s no samples or anything that is being used.
Everything is made using software synthesisers,” Carlsen says.
This is why Cocoon actually has a very simple control scheme.
You use a joystick to move, and one button does the rest of the work.
There are no triggers, no combos, and no menus with upgrades for players to navigate through.
“What I’m going to ask the player to solve is a complex thing.
How can I not make this into a complex product?’
was basically my thinking,” Carlsen explains.
“I have to pull in the other direction somehow.
And then one of the obvious ways to do that is to start with the simplest imaginable control scheme.
Because that removes a lot of noise.”
For a while, Cocoon did actually have a second button, the developers tell me.
“It drove me nuts,” Carlsen laughs.
Carlsen is not disappointed by this decision, however.
He actually believes it made Cocoon’s puzzles better as a result.
Our conversation turns to the orbs themselves, and the powers they hold.
But it turns out, there were actually several orbs that were cut from Cocoon ahead of release.
You are using them occasionally.
And then, just having this rhythm just going…
It’s so annoying.
It’s like why?
Why is this going about and, like, popping?"
However, it would only work when the rhythm was “on”.
There, you could maybe offset or like, extend the rhythm.
Other ideas the Cocoon team had included freezing time, Carlsen and Kho both tell me.
“You could put an orb into a time frozen bubble.
So let’s assume you had a word that had a bubble in it.
Cocoon also once had “guards” rather than the bosses.
These guards could detect the player, and kick them out of any given world.
You had to get deeper down the world hierarchy,” Carlsen says.
However, this idea began to get too structurally challenging.
So only getting a toy that does something with the other orbs just didn’t really make sense."
It is this weird science fiction mechanic.
Kho and Carlsen both smile at me, clearly aware that I am utterly bamboozled by the whole thing.
So, what is next for the Cocoon team?
Could we see more from these orb worlds in future?
“There is an idea I have been thinking on,” Carlsen says.
“Not for as long as Cocoon, but I have been thinking on for a while.”
