Plays Like You Remember: Adapting Classics for 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Shredder's Revenge'

[Music] remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were I'm pretty sure you didn't have prow cited over the Ninja Turtles on your GDC bingo card right so hello everyone my name is frederi Jus I've been working in the video game industry for over 15 years now and started my career at Ubisoft Montreal which explained the beautiful French Canadian accent your earring and worked on other on big AAA franchises over there such as Far Cry Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin's Creed but three years ago I decided to leave the AAA market and join tribute games a studio dedicated to making Retro Gaming inspired titles with a modern twist that might sounds like a weird jump to some of you but in the Montreal Retro Gaming Community I'm more known for the video game story I co-own R Ro

MTL a store dedicated to video games from every generations and the gaming podcast I co-host rroo a French podcast about modern and Retro Gaming I'm also a collector myself with over 3,000 unique titles in my collection which takes a lot of shell space so it is fair to say that I was pretty much meant to join my friends at tribute games who are also you know also share that same passion for Retro Gaming founded in 2011 by Jonathan aing and joh fris majar tribute games developed many titles mixing both retro inspired gameplays and modern features such as Mercenary Kings fln hook and penzer Paladin this love for modern interpretations of older generations of gaming definitively became relevant when both work on Scott Pilgrim versus the world the video game another pixelated beat him up title they worked on at Ubisoft before leaving and you know decided to go found their own Studio

having also worked on other beatm UPS games at Ubisoft including at TMNT Games tributes Founders always wanted to have a shot at making another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game inspired by the arcade and after discussions with Nickelodeon and a partnership with the amazing publisher daimu or daimu like people say here the project became a reality and just as the year 2020 started we also launched work on TMNT Shredder's revenge a six player drop in Dropout beat him up multiplayer game with 16 stages for around 3 hours of gameplay it is also important to note that the title would have no direct relation to konami's previous title uh but act more as a spiritual sequel so this is finally happening we're finally making our Dream TN game so where do we start looking at the legacy of the previous titles is probably you know the

obvious starting point fondly remembered for their exciting multiplayer gameplay their polished visuals and for containing all content from the show the AR kit games are probably some of the most memorable gaming memories for anyone hanging out in the arcades at the at you know the beginning of the 90s home conso ports were also very popular if not even more but captured the arids Magic in its own way with you know all of the limitations of each system at the time still after two successful archid titles and a few Home console versions and spin-offs the TMNT games disappeared for a while and ever since they came back many TMNT games that were released were actually you know met with comparison to the Beloved arid iterations so how can we succeed then first by understanding the core of the original games and what made them you know such Timeless classics

you need to dive deeper than what the player remember but use your knowledge of game design to understand why they were good games in the first place second you need to carefully choose which features are part of that core and which ones can be left behind you don't want to redo the originals you want to adapt them to Modern gaming standards and finally in order to keep the experience fresh and relevant as a new take on the franchise you need to determine the right the new features to add in order to you know make that core experience even stronger without compromising it basically this comes down to a saying that Jean franois warer always says make sure the game plays like how you would remember it not how it was or but simply play like you remember so what do people actually remember about the previous games so before I go further I just want to mention that the excellent cabanga collection compiling all of the TMNT

games from the '90s era came out after the release of Shredder's revenge so at the time these games were indeed memories for a lot of players out there so let's just ignore that for now so one of the strongest memories is of course the four players multiplayer experience you know all crammed around the cabinet then the visuals which were closer to the cartoon than any other video game at the time plus it featured all characters from The Beloved show the game also had non-stop action and some exciting stage setups with skateboard P shoots and even like time travel but more importantly it felt like an authentic TMNT experience on par with the show what's actually let's remember is how the games were you know classic coin Up archet Games built in a way to get as many quarters as it you know as it can from you it also featured limited range of abilities and some repetitions especially especially when you're

playing in free play this also highlights the Breakneck pace of some of the encounters where players can get swarmed by enemies for a minute and then the minute after just you know be left waiting for enemies to come back on screen and of course even more present in the Home console ports where all of the technical aspects like Sprite flickering slowdowns and you know all technical limitations that were there back in the days so hey that's easy then you just take what the players remember from the older titles and you simply avoid doing the bad things they forgot plus you know the technical aspect should be covered pretty much by itself but actually the correct answer is you indeed need to take time you know to analyze what players remember and take it as part of the ingredients for your game but you also need to take time to analyze the core gameplay of what you're trying to adapt and find what were the strong elements that actually kept the players around for long enough basically this is the recipe for the

adaptation of your game remember that intro about our love for older games well here's the thing we still enjoy these games today and play them regularly after all of these years so we got better understanding them and so can you you know with our modern understanding of game design it is a great exercise to actually take time to revisit all games to understand what made those games C in the case of TMNT we always felt that even though the arcade games were impressive the console ports especially the Nintendo NES version provided a clearer picture of what made the game great first the common aspect both the NES and the archid version have is the enemy design enemies are made to be dealt with quickly as soon as they enter the screen the gameplay focus on crowd control and how fast you can dispose of these enemies as they enter the arena in order to avoid getting swarmed rather

than focusing on you know the fighting aspect or the one-on-one combat with the technical limitations of consoles and a gameplay experience meant for longer play sessions you can also see that the enemies are more aggressive and spawn while performing actions mostly attacks resulting in you know more pressure on the player which counter replicates the swarming feelings that the player can get on the arcade this also induced a better pace for combats as less enemies on screen means you know how their entry in the arena and how the encounter unravels does create the real challenge it also provides a better control of the game balancing as there is obviously no need to get rid of the player after five minutes therefore giving some breeding time to the players and more opportunities for designers to come up with different types of challenges in the case of TMNT the arcade game on the NES Jonathan are game director always brought up how well the

game was balanced so that you can usually manage to get to Shredder at the end but hardly beat him our key discoveries from those sessions were that the pacing of these games were actually in actually an important part of their court experience the way enemies spawn and the speed at which they are disposed is also completely tied to how the combat encounters are structured and what makes the game play exciting we noticed that combat encounters almost felt like classic shoot him up games such as greedus or hard type where the spawning the spawning choreography directly impacts the players positioning and actions and finally all of this should result in a fair challenge that feels achievable all of these elements directly influence the players's experience even though they are not as commonly mention while talking about the classics and that is the actually the actual recipe for the game a simple to

jump in beat them up games that feel fair that feels Fair sorry where enemies are quick to defeat and in which the way enemies enter the fight is more important than how they actually fight it has to be built with multiplayer at its score and of course you know being authentic to the TMNT 1987 Universe with all of its silliness and colorful characters our analysis actually helped us identify aspects the players talked less about the Enemy being behaviors which is actually more important than you know to the core experience than most of the points since it greatly affects the core gameplay and at the end of the day if you look at these guidelines it's pretty much our game in Broad lines and now that we have the actual recipe for the game it's time to mix all of the features together in order to create the perfect adaptation at the core we knew the gaml had to be easy to pick up yet deep

enough to be engaging on the long run we built it with the same two button bases as the archet games a jump and an attack button which can basically let anyone get involved in the game quickly we decided to separate special attacks to their own buttons in order to avoid players mistakes while button mashing and added an extra Dodge button for more advanced combat strategies all of these actions can be combined either successively or similar ously for different outcomes that are clear to the players as they explore the controls also inspired by the archid games each characters are meant to be played the same way with the same input combinations but we added different outcomes and particularities for each for example Michelangelo can bounce on enemies after a dive kick or rapael will do a sulex instead of a you know standard throw this was meant for replayability as you know players can get to know each

characters but also as a way to be more multiplayer friendly since if your favorite character gets picked up you won't be forced to learn how to play a completely different character at one point we did push that philosophy a bit too far though we had longer recovery time to some character moves different cancel windows and you know other various game field tweaks based on characters which turned out to be too compx and cumbersome we we decided to remove most of these in order to keep the game feel more fluid and permissive and less you know feeling like an actual turtle and finally we wanted to counter some of the more common uh beat them up Flaws by locking the enemies on screen making the edges of the camera act as collisions so this prevented the expulsion of enemies from the screen which would resolve into downtime for the players as they have to wait for them to come back on screen but it also introduced the notion of juggling you

know a fun side effect we also worked hard on having self targeting of enemies on the depth axis so players wouldn't spend too much time missing enemies while attacking as it is often the case in some old school be ups when it came to building the levels the pacing discoveries we did in our research phase were very helpful for setting up the level design guidelines we knew we needed to have strong pacing where each encounters is eer structure by a succession of enemies a calculated flow of enemies that the players must manage or a constant flow that can get player overwhelmed if they don't react too quickly we looked at the NES game for the enemy per minute ratio which was around 20 to 30 enemies per minute as we felt it not only had one of the best balancing but also the clearer single player experience it also provided the clearer enemy choreography which we ended up calling the dance or a golden path if

you prefer we decided to build each stage with a golden path in mind where if the player position himself correctly and perform the right action at the right time you can basically complete each stages to Perfection by having a dance plan for each stages we were able to basically do a first paper pass of each stages design and notice where situations might get too similar or too uncomfortable but it didn't help us be the beat him up Grudge or the repetition that comes from you know the duration of stages our first stage iterations lasted above the 15 15 minute marks making the stage feels way too long and tedious we almost had to cut you know half of the first stage we built in order to keep the gam play engaging at the end of the day we notice that making stages last for under 10 minutes including the bus encounter was The Sweet Spot for keeping you know the the the gameplay engaging in

fresh Ai and combat Behavior were obviously another picko to work on as you know previous games mostly had simpler enemy AI where spawn enemies will mostly try to reach the player and launch an attack as soon as they can it is quite effective but it doesn't always feel exciting or you know it might end up feeling a bit more predictable we decided to make them a bit more complex by first introducing the notion of combat Circle a notion that might be familiar to some of you who worked on enemy designs where enemies could not only position themselves relatively to the player based on their current status but mostly avoid cluttering the player which could lead to actually making the combat easier since most of our attacks have quite some Reach This combat Circle logic was also very useful for managing how enemies switch focus in multiplayer making sure all players were always involved in combat and finally in order to control

you know the challenge we decided to base ourselves on an attack token logic inspired by a previous GDC talk from Kurt Ludi and Jake Campbell called embracing push forward combat in Doom with this logic enemies must request a token in order to perform an attack or a combo meaning that you can control the number of enemies that can attack simultaneously but also add a cool down to these tokens making the enemies more or less aggressive aggressive as a group this is especially useful when you're trying to create different difficulty settings but these Pro to be more or less efficient with our low HP enemies since some of them tried to reach you know specific positions in order to do an action or simply had to wait for a token in the middle of a Breakneck fight it became clear that we needed to not only reduce the cooldowns on attacks and increase the am of tokens at play in

order to reach an interesting fight in both scenarios with few or you know large group of enemies but we needed enemies to act faster at large this basically brought us you know once again to one of our key discoveries that we didn't follow too closely the enemy entrance is the game play by introducing more active spawning strategies we managed to resolve most of our inactive and slow to- react Ai and provide aw more exciting combat and finally we had you know the core game play pretty much nailed down and as you can see all of the features are coming along together pretty well for the recipe but we're still missing a very important ingredient the multiplayer now it was time to put everything together for you know the best C Co-op experience possible but we're now in the middle of a global pandemic and we're all working from home the pandemic obviously impacted all of us in terms of how we

approach game development but in this case it kind of forced us to do quite a positive compromise focus on the online first making a local co-op experience isn't as risky as making it online with all of the replication issues lag and everything that the players like to La label as net code you know so for a small team like ours for it forced us to make sure that every features first iterations was always multiplayer ready this meant a lot more development time for you know to invest in each first iterations but also a more stable overall experience as we went along as for replication we knew the nature of the game would make it very hard to perfectly replicate everything that is happening on screen for each players so we decided to focus on each player's experience if you're attacking an enemy this enemy will be replicated perfectly on your machine but might be a bit off on the other players sides players Focus

dictated the priorities of replications and at the end of the day even though you might spot inaccuracies each player's gameplay experience is always solid and enjoyable especially with six players creating pure Chaos on screen now that we had all of the features from the core gameplay we adapted it was time to you know add our own touch to the mix with new ingredients to try the obvious choice of action When approaching you know older titles is to change some of the more restrictive rules one key aspect from most classic beat him up games is the fact that special attacks will cost health points to use them creating a very high risk versus reward scenario that according to us doesn't really work in tmnt's case in fact some of the TMNT games themselves do not abide to this rule at all using these special moves to get out of trouble in a game with tons of enemies

might happen too often for a game with a cost on these actions as it would force us to greatly increase the amount of Health recovery in items and stages therefore removing some sense of risk in the overall game play yet removing any risk or cost to these would be as problematic for the game playay as it would make them the only viable strategy we decided in the end to link them to a new combo system which fills a special power bar that can be consumed by the player to do that to do these actions the idea seen in fighting game became clear to us while replaying the Tonio PR kitter games uh where if you reach a certain amount of tricks in a row or combo you gain access to moves that are more valuable this concept work well with our game with Hardcore gameplay as keeping the player engaged in combat at all time and dealing with enemies as soon as they

as they Spa means that they would get rewarded with even more powerful tools to do that but in order to keep things accessible for Less experienced player we also allowed players to use a Taun action to refill that same bar we felt that it was a good compromise for players uh risking themselves into a Taun animation to be able to stuck on these moves and felt that if you know a player wanted to abuse them they would it would only mean that they were willingly sacrificing the quality of their experience however what we didn't plan ahead uh is that this would end up ruining the experience of some online players as every combat sequences would end some players would spam the to button multiple times in a row in order to fully refill their special moves meaning that some players might end up waiting for almost 10 seconds before progressing to the next challenge this led us to a fix in one of our title

updates preventing players to spam it for more than one time you know therefore keeping a middle ground between giving the tools to players in need and avoiding abuse and for the players who H who wanted this completely removed we also added an extra custom uh game mode as a free title update in which players could completely turn it off another thing we wanted to focus on is is making a game that can actually scale and adapt itself for multiplayer the AI and enemy logic already tackled with the combat circles worked well with this but we also wanted the game play to adapt we decided to have an adaptative level design which could change based on the number of players at play we didn't want it to do so with an automated system uh that would simply add more enemies as this would you know mean even more things on scam but decided to do to do it by hand

so this way we could you know do things such as replacing two enemies by one stronger enemy or simply changing the layout configuration to something that felt more interesting at the end of the day we build these encounters trying to keep every players busy at all time forcing them to scatter or regroup based on the enemy's actions this obviously meant we had to redo each stages multiple times so we settled with only three configurations one for single player another for two to three players and one for more than four players we went with these as we noted that as soon as we go over four players things on screen become pure chaos the game remains fun but the action becomes very hard to read and the whole gameplay becomes more of a button mashing party game which isn't necessarily a bad thing considering that you're probably playing with five other friends we also wanted to add Co-op

attacks that would not require complex synchronizations but could occur by accident so for example if two players attack an enemy from both sides they would do a sandwich attack instead of you know doing the regular attack these worked well in local multiplayer and created great water cooler moments when triggered but ended up being a nightmare to handle with the online lag for forcing us to reduce their occurrence their occurrence with strict rules in order to avoid creating weird situations where players would trigger them without understanding why due to lat due to latency and finally we also introduce a notion of revives where players can get revived by their teammates when knocked down creating an interesting dynamic between combat and teamwork as you know it forces players to quickly switch switch focus in the middle of tense scenarios but of course one of the

recurrent memories from playing the older games in multiplayer was stealing the pizza PowerUp which rewards you with HP from another player in need we decided to introduce a notion of party pizzas a simple fix which heals everyone on pickup but we still added some single player you know pizzas through heat stages in order to keep that couch drama that makes the local multiplayer so fun while focusing on doing a multiplayer player game we also wanted to offer something for single player we decided to do so by uh by providing two game modes a story mode and an arcade mode arcade mode was built on classic arcade rules where you need to beat the game with a limited amount of credits but story mode is there to provide players with a longer experience with both safed progression and character upgrades this quickly brought up the question of having side missions which is something that didn't necessarily match our Gameplay at first since it's

not only you know since not only the core gameplay is fast-paced and engaging but the whole narrative around the game revolves around a Chase we decided to up most of these on collecting items hidden through each each stages which not only avoided you know for us to create extra content that didn't fit our main stages but also helped us give more importance to uh supporting characters by giving them extra interactions to the player with the player and as stated we also introduced the notion of character progression but kept those two basically extra gameplay helpers like more HP new special attacks and more power bars as we wanted the players to be able to tackle each challenges whether they were level one or level 10 where we might have missed the mark though was on the naming convention for the story mode since both modes were fully supporting multiplayer we didn't want it to have any single player mode and decided to go with story mode and

designation often using gaming in hindsight the the story mode was probably not the right name since most players felt that like they would get extra Cuts scenes or such and probably should have been called more like a campaign or something like that to avoid the confusion and finally the big thing we absolutely wanted to do was making sure that the game would be enjoyed by everyone at tribute games we always strive to make that game which can introduce younger uh generations to Retro Gaming and with Shredder's revenge it felt like we hit that Mark better than ever with all of the accessibility changes we did we received messages from parents telling us that they were able to introduce their kids to the game casual gamers that wanted to give it a try in order to relive the older archet days had a blast fans of the shows and fans of the old games enjoyed it basically everyone except of course a few people mostly from the more hardcore beatm up

audiences most of these complaints revolved around you know the difficulty level of the game or the respect of some old tropes from the BM ofj for example like being Invincible while performing trolles or not consuming any HP from you know HP while performing special attacks at the end of the day pleasing these audiences would mean compromising the things that newcomers and less experienc player likes this is why we decided to provide an extra game mode for free in post launch where players can basically tweak the rules of the of the Arid mode similar to dip switches you know from older arid cabinets meaning that casual players could actually make the game Easier by enabling options such as free play but hardcore players could make the game even harder with more aggressive enemies classic HP consuming special moves or removing any tun bonuses this also helped give a second win to the game just in time for the holidays where

you know even more players of all type could enjoy the game so at the end of the day did we actually succeeded at making a worthy spiritual successor to the older tmn arcade games on June 16 2022 on pretty much all consoles the game was finally out we ended up with Metacritic scores between 84 to 87 persons depending on the console with very positive feedback from the community in terms of sales of sales figure we sold over 1 million copies in the first week alone a massive success for both tribute games and daimu but also for Nickelodeon our partnership with Xbox and game packs also keeps you know bringing new players to to this day and so does the instore physical copies and we also ended 2022 with multiple Awards and nominations beautifully turning the page on quite a successful year this success can be attributed to the

amazing work from you know the whole team at tribute games which was always committed to delivering the best experience possible and the incredible support and dedication from darimu but also to our philosophy to make the game plays just like you remember and with a strong analysis of what you're trying to adapt by adapting features instead of reproducing them and by carefully adding your own touch to the mix you too can succeed at you know Reviving any beloved franchise to the modern gaming scene thank [Applause] [Music] you