| This article is based on the exclusive licensing agreement between Campfire and Game Informer in China, and please repost with your consent.
At the dawn of TUNIC, lead developer Andrew Shouldice was caught up in a difficult decision: should he stay in his stable job or quit his job to devote himself to the nascent game idea? In 2015, Shouldice gritted her teeth and closed her eyes and jumped out of the car. But when asked why he made the decision, he hesitated.
"Yeah, why?" Shouldice chuckled and replied, his exaggerated tone already hinting at how long TUNIC's development cycle was, and he couldn't tell what particular thing had motivated him to make the decision. In fact, there was more than one factor that contributed to this decision, he used to enjoy making one-off projects, and his interest in his work was diminishing, so his departure was expected.
"I remember thinking, this might be a bad decision," Shouldice recalls, "but I'd rather make this bad decision right away than regret it later, you know?" Although this sounds quite cheesy, I finally made up my mind because of this. I really wanted to do it, even though it might be a bad idea, but at least I tried."
After seven years of grand debut on the E3 stage, tunic is finally being released. This bright, bright equidistant action game lets players play as a fox with a sword in his hand, navigating a world full of twisting roads, mysterious buildings, ruthless enemies and hidden mysteries.
Over the years, TUNIC's art style, combat, and setting have won more and more attention. While it's one of the most anticipated indie games of the year so far, it started out as a small, personal project. Now, as the release date draws closer, the TUNIC development team looks back on the game's journey from obscurity to anticipation, and shares with us the challenges, hopes, and unforgettable moments along the way.
Set off on an adventure
After giving up the guarantees of a stable job, Shouldice sat down with coffee in hand and began his project, which was not even a complete concept. During this early stage of development, his only direction was to make a game that "hides a lot of secrets" and the protagonist has to "go on adventures".
The game's now-known fox protagonist took shape at this moment. While the Sabre Fox was one of tunic's favorite elements, it was also a testament to the uncertainty of the project's early days. The developers acknowledge that the protagonist's vision stems in part from their lack of skill in making human models, and that this is not unique. Shouldice recalls that in the early stages of development, his lack of experience caused him many difficulties.
"This was the first large-scale, commercial 3D game I made," Says Shouldice, "and for a long time I was the only developer." Although I do eat by writing code, there are many, many things I have to learn when it comes to game development, and code is not even the hardest part of it."
Shouldice realized he might need a little support, so he turned to others who could help him make the game.
Terence Lee, the composer of TUNIC, originally received an email from Shouldice in 2015. While he was excited about the idea of the game, Lee wasn't sure if he could make music for the adventure game because there was other work on it. Later that year, at the Game Developers Conference, the lead developer of TUNIC contacted Lee and Kevin Regamey of Power Up Studio, who was involved in the game's sound design.
After playing an early version of TUNIC, Regamey recognized the game's potential. "I played that version for about ten hours, and it was amazing." Regamey said, "The whole team of Power Up Audio played, and we were like, 'Which god man did this?'" What made Regamey even more memorable was what Shouldice said at the time." "These things probably won't appear in the final product of the game." He's telling the truth, and nothing in that version ends up in the finished product."
Fortunately, not everything from tunic's early days has been discarded, such as the extremely quiet and tranquil musical style. "I like the contrast between the soft and pleasant graphics of the game, but the difficulty of the game," Lee says, "so when I was giving it the soundtrack, I deliberately tried to make the music quiet and relaxed." I think a lot of people should feel that too."
Both the composer and the sound designer expressed the importance of soundscape to TUNIC, with Regamey saying, "Sound is just as important as a character in a game, and there are many moments in the game where it is necessary to make sound the focus of highlights. Music and sound effects and other such details (such as game design, level design, and art design) are interconnected."
Thread the needle leads
With the help of the team, Shouldice was able to create a truly viable game, and the concepts of "secrets" and "adventures" in the early days of development were reinvented. What excites Shouldice the most is that "the picture is beautiful and pleasant" and "difficult" are not two opposing extremes.
Speaking about tunic's main inspiration, Shouldice explains: "In some games, such as the early Zelda titles, there are places that are beautiful and colorful, but they are also accompanied by many difficulties and challenges, which can inspire players to brave the courage to advance into unfamiliar areas that they were not ready to face."
Shouldice's design philosophy for adventure games is quite clear, not only hoping to allow the characters in this world to meet enemies and explore treasure chests, but also hope that the game will stimulate the player's sense of adventure.
"One of the things that excites me the most about this game is that when I see something scary, I have to choose whether to fight or run, which is quite exciting," Says Shouldice.
This feeling is not limited to combat, and the developers of TUNIC say that players encounter seemingly impossible challenges during exploration, or step into areas like forbidden lands, which are important parts of the game he appreciates. Shouldice said he hopes that when players experience TUNIC, they will be able to think in time whether they have walked into a place that should not be going now.
Nostalgia has always been a great tool in creating TUNIC. Obviously, the game drew a lot of inspiration for the graphics and design aspects of the NES, SNES, and Game Boy", but it didn't stop there. The development team talked about the feeling they were trying to reproduce, such as players digging up unexpected backstories through in-game text, or working with friends to solve difficult puzzles, which has faded in today's era when you can search for strategies online at any time.
"The text you pick up isn't just a collection, nor is it designed to give you the satisfaction of a full collection. You may have had a similar experience, where when you flip through some in-game texts, you can feel that they are also an extension of the game experience." "In those old games, there were secrets and items that the player wouldn't know until they had read the text, and tunic was the same, and there were a lot of things you needed to read the pages carefully to discover."
The last piece of the puzzle
As the core of the game took shape, producer Felix Kramer joined the team, and in 2017, publisher Finji (masterpieces "Little Chrysanthemum: A Colorful Fairy Tale" and "Night in the Woods") began to take the project to the public. A year later, TUNIC took the Xbox to the main stage at E3.
"Playing the game promo at the show was a really valuable memory for me," Sayice said, "I can't tell if it's a warm and vague memory, after all, I felt like I was going to have a cardiac arrest several times that day, but it was definitely a lifetime."
Although the entire team had been developing TUNIC for three years at the time, it was only in 2018 that the public first learned about the game and began to pay attention to its development process. New fans attracted included many game makers who were also involved in the project and began to incorporate their ideas into their own productions. "People say from time to time that they got their inspiration from TUNIC," Says Shouldice, "and considering that the game itself has taken a lot of inspiration from other places, it's amazing to hear people say that."
One such producer is Eric Billingsley, who joined tunic's development team in 2020 as a level designer. "Before that, I was working on my own solo project, Spring Falls, and TUNIC was one of my references in terms of visual effects. So it was exciting for me to be part of the team," Billingsley says, "and most of the areas of the game were already well-lit, but there were a lot of places that still didn't look finished, so my job was to look at those areas and make them rich and look as good as the rest of the game."
Development dilemma
Having watched the game from the sidelines, the new tunic now has been able to work on it himself, and the new tunic is excited, but at the same time he's realistic. The level designer joined the years-long development process halfway through, and looking back on it, Billingsley recalls not only his passion, but also the difficulties he had encountered in his new role.
"One of the biggest challenges in my opinion was that the game was too stylized, so sometimes it was hard to tell if it was finished," Billingsley recalls, "and if you add too much detail, it might not look as tunic, but if it's not detailed, it can make it look like a half-finished product." In terms of level design, even if you record the connection between various things, sometimes something will go wrong."
But many of TUNIC's problems ended up being the game's strengths, for example, when several members initially thought the game's equidistant perspective was very limited, Billingsley said the perspective could be extremely limited, but "the hidden advantage of this is that it's now very easy to design hidden paths." This design fits well with Shouldice's philosophy of wanting to keep the game full of secrets and encouraging players to explore.
Power Up Audio's Kevin Regamey also highlighted the equidistant angle design, saying it could "cause the player to hear the sound but not see the source of the sound because it's blocked out of the view." But as with the level design, this limitation is actually a potential advantage.
Regamey said: "Nowadays, there is basically no traditional 3D sound in the game, it is all 2D, just like playing sound effects, so it will feel like the design of the previous era." This further enhances the nostalgia of the game, as it has done in previous "crooked" times, once again bringing TUNIC closer to its original philosophy.
Time flies
Over the past few years, this "all-in-one" team has been working on TUNIC in preparation for the game's official launch in 2022. But some fans have been aware of this work since 2018 and have waited for nearly four years to finally play it, and the chief developer of TUNIC naturally realized this.
"I feel like I'm responsible for the development time." Shouldice indicates. Although he started the project about seven years ago, he also admits that his lack of experience has slowed down the entire development process.
"I'm going to make content, I'm going to design levels, and I'm going to learn how to do modeling animations and all sorts of things like that." "I think I can say very clearly that every part of the game has been remade at least once or twice," he said. The key model you got early in the game may still be the original version, but as I learned more about the game, a lot of other material was redone during subsequent developments."
His teammates also freely admit that the game has taken longer to develop than all of them thought, pointing out other factors that have prolonged development. Composer Terence Lee reflected that early in development, no one on the team even knew what the finished game would look like, which led to frequent adjustments in development. In addition, sound designers and level designers have also emphasized that some time-consuming but necessary changes have further increased development time.
Billingsley said, "Our team is really small, so we can't make the game very quickly." According to Billingsley, the game was twice as big as it is now, but most of it was vacant lots.
Regamey was hesitant to talk about the cuts, and he was a little worried that it would disappoint fans, but he went into detail about one of the cuts in TUNIC.
"There used to be a desert area in TUNIC," Regamey explains, "but not now, because running through the dunes isn't as fun as the rest of the game."
Final stage
The TUNIC team announced at TGA in December that the game would be released on March 16 of this year, and now they are finally close to their own finishing point. The launch was an achievement for the entire team, and their promotional video kicked off the grand show, with TGA winning a record-breaking 85 million live views that year. Now, the final phase is finally over, and the developers of TUNIC have mixed feelings, and at the end of the journey, they can't tell whether they are relieved or nervous.
In this final moment, though, Shouldice expressed his expectations for TUNIC, which he hoped would capture the "innocence and curiosity" he had sparked as a child playing games. "I don't know if people can feel that vibe in the final product of the game, but I hope so," he says.
Translation: TNKSKS
Edit: Zoe