How knitting inspired the clone-based gameplay of The Last Clockwinder

gamedeveloper.com:

The Last Clockwinder sees players creating clones of themselves, steadily creating a clockwork of robots executing their exact last action in order to solve massive puzzles. It challenges you to think about how you would turn yourself into every step of a complex machine to solve the challenges at hand.

Game Developer spoke with John Austin of Pontoco, the development team behind the title, on how they created an experience that would involve dozens of clones of the player and what problems that might cause, the thoughts behind making a hopeful world to solve puzzles in, and about how the process of knitting would lead to the cloning ideas in the game.

Game Developer: In The Last Clockwinder, players use clones of their actions to slowly build up mechanisms to solve puzzles. What inspired this idea?

Pontoco: The idea actually goes back quite far to about 2016. At that time, we were in-between projects and had been discussing ideas for prototypes in the meantime. One of us in the group was an avid knitter, so we had been thinking about knitting games. Knitting is essentially the process of repeating simple actions over and over again, and what better way to do that than with copies of your own actions!

The knitting idea eventually dropped away, but the cloning idea stuck. We spent a few months making a prototype of The Last Clockwinder for the original HTC Vive, but unfortunately, the time wasn’t right for us to pursue the project then. It wasn’t until 2019 that we picked the project back up full-time and began to develop something closer to the final game today.

One day I still want to tackle that knitting game though…imagine slinging around giant noodles to make a scarf [laughs]!

What interested you in doing this in VR? What