Playdead's secret "project two" is "more weird" than Limbo

Playdead's secret "project two" is "more weird" than Limbo, boss Dino Patti has said.

It's "more 3D than you would think," Patti told Eurogamer at the GameCity6 festival in Nottingham.

Cryptic Danish developer Playdead is keeping its follow up to the enchanting black and white downloadable game Limbo under wraps - despite having worked on it for over a year now.

"I think it looks crazy good," Patti said. "I'm really proud of it already. I know the art is not fully there yet, but for me it's the perfect project two for our company, because it's similar in many ways, but so different.

"The next project is more crazy than Limbo, if you say that's crazy. It's more weird in many ways."

When pressed, Patti confirmed the game is single-player ("right now") and will almost certainly be a downloadable game. Oh, and it's in colour.

Playdead is stubbornly refusing to reveal the game because Patti is frustrated by the long wait gamers normally suffer from announcement to release.

"We just want the team to be happy about it," Patti explained. "Also, our production time is long, so we don't want to tire people out. I hate when the big publishers show something one or two years before the launch.

"The IO guys, who are also Danish, had an AR game until E3, and at E3 they announced the project. Hitman 5! Everyone knew it. They said, it'll be out in 2012. I'm not really waiting for that one because I want to have an announcement one month before, two weeks before or something. That's an ordinary person's attention span.

"We'll probably talk about [project two] a bit before [it's out]. We still haven't decided when we'll talk about it."

Neither has Playdead decided on a name for the game or launch platforms. "Hopefully we'll do bigger distribution next time," Patti said. "I want more people to play the game. Limbo sold really well, but if we'd done a multiplatform launch the first time it would be even bigger.

"That's our goal. I can't promise anything. Last time we developed for PC and then we started talking to Sony and Microsoft. When we got a deal in place we started moving in that direction. The new one we're developing on the Unity game engine. I just hope that engine follows all the platforms. We will, too.

"We are aiming to go as wide as possible. At this point it's hard to promise, because I don't know what consoles there will be or what deals. It went really well on XBLA. I'm really happy with those guys. But it also went really well on PlayStation."

Despite having made "a lot of money" from Limbo, which launched last year as an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive, Patti said Playdead is starting from scratch in many respects because it recently bought out an investor from the company. And soon Patti will need to find a publisher.

"We want to be fully independent. We want the final creative decisions being taken by Arnt [Jensen], my partner, because he's the director. That's important for us to create the things we're creating. If we find a partner who understands that, we'll go with them."