Transcription
[Music] Hello and welcome to Developer Breakdown, the show where we ask developers to break down various elements of their video game design so that people like me can understand how games are made. Using gameplay from early prototypes, visual aids, and insights from the developer, we're going to explain, as best we can, how these games are put together.
In this, our first episode, we're talking to Andrew Shouldice, creator of the game Tunic. An isometric action game with obvious inspirations from classic Zelda titles, in which you control a small fox exploring a mysterious world. It's available on PC and Xbox platforms as part of Game Pass and has gotten some great reviews from critics and players alike.
Tunic is a game with a lot of interesting tech and design, from its unique tilt-shifted camera look to its Souls-inspired combat, in-game manual, and the curious way it reveals its game world. There's a lot of cool stuff to explore here, but let's start with how Tunic looks.
[Music] Hi, my name is Andrew Shouldice, and today we're going to break down the design of Tunic. It started as low poly because, uh, those were about all the polys I could be confident that I could make look decent. I started out with very little 3D experience. You know, I had, I messed with Blender a little bit, but the very first fox was mostly plotted out on graph paper.
I think the biggest turning point was, uh, embracing Blender and its animation tools. I've been doing a lot of animation within Unity, which has a robust animation system that's very useful for things like effects and the like. So it was, yeah, getting more confident in, in Blender and deciding, you know, let's, let's tear it all down and start over as far as characters are concerned. Although that's not entirely true, I think there are some creatures like this little blob that you're fighting, uh, that are still old-school, um, animations authored in Unity.
I started sharing, uh, Vines of the game, R.I.P. Vine, and they were, you know, little loops of, "Here's a little character run around the world." People saw enough charm there that they were interested in it. And one of the challenges that came from refining the art style was trying to fine-tune the amount of fidelity or visual noise in any given composition. You know, if you add too much visual noise or make it super realistic, it's going to stand out. And if you make it too simplistic, it's going to look incomplete.
The grass and the bushes, those were, those are meshes that have existed since, uh, the very beginning, basically. And those sort of represent the cornerstone of the low-poly aesthetic that the game started with.
The camera in the game is what's called, um, isometric perspective, which people are maybe familiar with. It just means that it's this particular angle most of the time in Tunic. And, uh, an important part of that is having, uh, what's called an orthographic projection, which is sort of like having a camera that is infinitely zoomed. You know, this camera is infinitely far, far away and infinitely zoomed in, so that the sort of field of view are two parallel lines. Now, they're not on top of one another, they've been scooted apart so that you're, you're sort of the volume that you're viewing is a prism with perpendicular edges. And that has some interesting effects. It's not something that we normally see in real life, uh, because we, you know, have eyes that work sort of like normal cameras with an FOV to them. Um, but what this means is that the game sort of looks like a map. It's sort of flattened in a particular way. It's all 3D assets. You can tilt the camera, and we do some tricks with that later on. But generally speaking, it's, uh, compressed depth-wise.
And so, yeah, we need to do some fancy tricks to get some depth of field happening and make sure that when someone walks up to an edge, most of the time they can intuit that, "Oh, this is an edge, and what's beyond it is something that is further away from me." And sometimes it's not clear, but most of the time we've tried to make sure that either with depth of field, or, you know, when a lot of depth information has been removed, we need to use other tricks, like, yeah, having an extremely strong source of light that casts very prominent shadows and sort of gluing things to surfaces by having tiny shadows underneath them.
Why is it then that whenever you sort of lock on to somebody, um, that you have this little sort of shift on the camera? What's, what's that exposing, or what, what's that, what's that utility?
The main one is to give you a better sense of what the geometry of the space is like. One of the problems with an isometric perspective, the angle is a little bit too shallow for something like combat design. And a lot of time in games, especially sort of what we might say an isometric game or a top-down, uh, dick game with three-quarters view, there's a lot of cheating that happens. Cheating is in, "Oh, we need to make sure that, uh, looks like this hit should land, then it should land." Geometric honesty of a game that's actually built in 3D means that you don't necessarily have those opportunities to cheat, hitboxes and stuff like that easily. So, tilt the camera a little bit, and suddenly you, you have, give people a better view of what's going on. And an add-on to that is that people will learn that because the camera shifts when you're in combat, you can also press that same button when you're outside of combat and maybe find a secret that you didn't realize was there. You know, tilt the camera a little bit, and, "Oh, I see what you did there."
On top of that, we're doing a bunch of sort of post-effects, you know, like bloom and color correction. There's a subtle effect across the entire game view that is a, a screen-space gradient from a sort of sunshiny warm orange in the upper right, down to a cooler blue down in the lower left.
Tension and release is something that we talked a lot about when building these sort of gauntlets. And one of the analogies that we talked about is, uh, rock climbing. And I do not possess the upper body strength to do rock climbing, but my understanding is that routes across a wall, they've got a hard bit. And sometimes they've got that bit right at the beginning. And then suddenly the tension is, "I got past this. Now I need to pace myself. Stay calm. Everything's fine. Just keep your wits about you, you're gonna be fine." Or you have a different style where the heartbeat is at the end, and that's the part that you keep, um, hurling yourself against. And so it's a matter of this slow conservation of resources to make sure that you're ready to push through at the very end. And then the tension is this anticipation of that moment. And organizing those sorts of experiences, uh, within these, these stretches and punctuating them with either shortcuts or checkpoints or whatever is a tricky balance to achieve.
If you want to really boil down this dungeon, it's about teaching the player how to use their shield. There are these turrets that, uh, held you with, you know, missile attacks, and you might be in water, so you, you can't dodge them as easily. You've got these things that sort of demand you stun them with your shield. And then also communicating, "Hey, these things explode. That's bad." "Hey, these things explode. That's cool. I can use this to my advantage."
Here's another interesting little aspect of level design. Um, you have the, the stairs here accessible, but you also have these barrels which you could remove out of the way. And what are you trying to play with or communicate to the player in, in this little area?
So those barrels do a few things. Um, if you were brash and decided to just charge past these monsters, "I don't have time to deal with you," then suddenly you're at this spot where you need to whack at some barrels a little bit. And so you have this, you know, a little bit of friction for the player. Um, there's also the opportunity to allow the player to see that those obstacles can also be, uh, interacted with by enemies. So this turret, for instance, um, is, you know, you can hide behind it, uh, by going behind the barrels, um, but not for long. Um, and it invites players to maybe realize, "Hey, if I keep going and use this turret to maybe shoot at some of these enemies in the next area." All those sorts of interactions are things that are fun to experiment with and fun to realize exist.
I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask Andrew about level design in Tunic, and not just about how dungeons are laid out, but also how the larger world in Tunic manages to create this really deep sense of mystery that was very reminiscent of early Zelda games, but also in modern times, the Soulsborne series. And while we're on the subject, how did Andrew and the team land on the combat for this game? It's similar to a lot of those titles, but far less punishing. And by the way, if this 15-minute video isn't enough for you and you're interested in learning more, an hour-long extended cut of this interview is available right now over patreon.com/noclip. And while we're doing the housekeeping, make sure you subscribe to watch more Developer Breakdown episodes in the coming weeks. We'll be telling you what games are coming up next at the end of this video. Alright, back to the fox.
[Music] The design of the game in general comes from discovering things that were always there. Communicate to the player that these sorts of secrets exist. You didn't even realize that this sort of thing is hidden here. And that's my very favorite sort of game is one where, as you play, you don't just find new things in your path, but suddenly the entire path that you've traveled becomes littered with question marks. You know, "How many more dimensions of exploration have I not yet discovered, even in the things that I've already seen?" A question mark is exciting. It fires the imagination. You know, "What's behind this door? What does all of this mean?" And the greatest reward that I, I feel like as a player, want, I want another layer. I want a profound revelation behind the waterfall, or maybe just a weird thing that makes me realize, "So there's more going on here than that I know about."
We would talk about puzzles or secrets as having a percentage attached to them. So the, the sort of spooky entrance to the left there with the skulls on it is a, that's a 100%. We sort of want people to go in there and realize, "Wait, this is above my pay grade. I can't deal with this right now." And then there are ones that we realized, "Hey, people aren't finding this very much. That's, that's the perfect 10 secret to hide this thing."
The beginning of the game is, you found a stick, you can use it to whack guys. Um, and then you get to the point where, "Wow, some, some of these monsters hit hard. I better start experimenting with dodging." And then you get a sword. And at that point, maybe you get a shield a little bit later. At that point, you sort of have a fairly complete vocabulary.
Early on, the, say, stamina system for the game was similar to something that you would see in like a Souls game, but eventually got refined by way of, you know, a massive debug menu with a bunch of checkboxes that I could noodle with and think like, "Well, what if it cost a little bit less or a little bit more? Or stamina was only used for blocking? Or what if you got stamina back by hitting enemies?" And eventually we landed on a situation where it turned into a sort of risk-reward situation. So in Tunic, you can always attack, and you can always dodge, even. But if you run your meter down all the way, suddenly you are going to take more damage and get knocked over more readily. You don't have any iframes.
Allowing for people to get away with things, I think, is important. Just like slipping behind a waterfall and finding a secret that you weren't meant to find, or finding a, a weird little path that lets you get an item much sooner than you're quote-unquote supposed to. Those sorts of genuine discoveries and feeling like you are transgressing in some way, letting people, you know, get away with things, letting people use their resources in a particular way, find that, "Wow, this item is especially effective against this boss," or, "Bombs seem really OP." Right? That's, that's intentional. You want to let people feel like they, you know, they pulled one over on the designer by being clever, by being brave.
The, the line between, uh, clever technique and cheese is a tricky one, because it feels very bad to watch someone approach your boss fight, you know, it's meticulously designed and all these balanced, uh, attacks and, um, counter-attacks, and they just realize like, "Oh no, you can use item X and it trivializes it." That doesn't feel good. But generally speaking, if players are having a good time, if they feel like they did it because of their own cleverness, then I think that's a success.
Before I talked to Andrew, I asked our patrons over on the Noclip Discord what they'd like to know about Tunic, and a lot of people asked about something that I actually hadn't considered. So let's talk to Andrew about the game's manual.
Tunic has its own in-game manual, which you piece together by finding pages in the game world. Outside of simply teaching the player how the game works, it can be used to reveal mysterious things about the world and even secret tactics used to explore and defeat its enemies. So where did the idea for this manual come from?
I have many precious memories of leafing through old instruction manuals when I was a kid. You did not have the luxury of including a lot of text on an N64 card, right? Those, you know, we need those bytes for music or whatever. But, you know, you've got pages in the manual to tell the story of the game, outline mechanics and how they work. And a lot of the game design was offloaded into those documents. And so I wanted to have that sort of feeling of wonder. You know, "Here's a diagram that says 'invulnerability' with a little bar that shows where you have your iframes." And that's extremely explicit, like it's right there. But because you needed to, you know, flip the page over and sort of like, "Okay, I think I see what's happening here." You know, you feel like an archaeologist. You, you really discovered this thing that is just exists in the document.
This is blank, but this is the, this is the document that I scanned to get the accurate, uh, sort of page gutters and crumpled pages, paper and everything. And it's like, grimed up and folded over and, you know, smears and stains and stuff. Through to the dryer for a while.
One of the things that we want to accomplish with this game is to make people feel like they're a stranger in a strange land, like they're not meant to be here. Part of the way that we accomplish that is with this strange language. You know, it's, it's not meant for you. Even the signs, even the UI, you know, have a little bit of mystery in them. Some people, uh, have said, "Oh, this makes me feel like how I felt when I, you know, imported a game for the first time." Although I didn't have those experiences, I also played video games as a child and did not understand what Morph Ball meant. The feeling that somebody is earnestly trying to communicate with me, and I just do not know. It's not like someone's keeping something from you, it's just that they haven't, you know, this isn't made for you. And that is, uh, that's cool.
Thanks so much to Andrew Shouldice for talking to us about the design of Tunic, and thanks so much to you for checking out this new series. Be sure to subscribe to our channel here, Noclip Crew, if you'd like to watch upcoming Developer Breakdown episodes on games such as Unpacking and Weird West, among many others we've got planned. And if you like the work we do here at Noclip, please head over to patreon.com/noclip and help us out. See you next time.
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