Deep Dive: How one design decision totally reinvented co-op in Figment 2

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as the scientific modeling behind the irrigation and water systems of Timberborn, how the 2D art of Songs of Glimmerwick benefited from a 3D art pipeline, and how the synergy between art and audio disciplines and a solid base of real-world data formed a surprisingly faithful televised broadcast experience in F1 Manager 2022.

In this edition, two key developers tell us about the motivations and mechanisms behind the co-op feature in Figment 2. 

Hello! We are Klaus Pedersen (CEO) and Niels Højgaard Sørensen (game and audio director) from Bedtime Digital Games, based in Aalborg, Denmark. We’re a small award-winning studio, having previously developed and self-published three titles: Back to Bed, Chronology, and Figment. We recently ventured into publishing and our first was The Forest Quartet, a game about life, death, and jazz.

For the past couple of years, we’ve been working on Figment 2: Creed Valley, an action-adventure game set in the human mind, where you play as Dusty—courage incarnate—and must face nightmares in musical showdowns.

Figment 2 is improving and expanding the franchise in a lot of different ways, but the largest is the addition of a co-op mode, in opposition to Figment 1, which is a strictly single-player game. The co-op feature was implemented due to a recurring theme found in the numerous messages we received from players over the years: A lot of parents were playing Figment with their children, some had their kids