Shadow Tactics Postmortem: Commandos with Ninja

[Music] all right hey everyone uh glad to made it to my talk uh my name is Mo I'm the lead designer at mimimi I'm not 12 years old as you might think I'm 31 actually to get that out of the way quickly um I hope there's going to be two key takeaways you have from this postmortem for shadow tactics it's a design Focus postmortem so maybe you learn something about game design or our approach or what not to do and you will definitely learn that I'm a horrible artist because I drew through the whole thing because I like Doodles um but you'll have to sit through that now I guess um all right so let's jump straight ahead to the release day of Shadow tactics um this was the team on our release day which coincident was the same day that the German developer awards were held and we were nominated uh for many of them and we won many of

them and we got very drunk and it was like going up the stage getting an award coming down checking the steam sales being like yes and going up again and getting very very drunk and everybody was very happy and supposed to be very very happy but there was a big Dark Cloud hanging above us um because we knew that likely uh the studio would not exist anymore in one month of time and that was because during the development as there were multiple reasons for this um the the time of development for shadow tactics was scheduled to be 18 months um and we realized that we would need more time like three more months was what we needed and so sometime during development that became clear and we had to put our own money into that and this were the savings we had to sort of survive until the next project would roll in after Shadow tactics and we had multiple projects lined up for that and they one by one kept breaking away uh as things can happen and so we stood there and we made the decision as the whole whole team um saying okay do we put

those three months into the game and go out with a very nice game maybe or do we not do that and feel bad about it for the rest of our lives maybe so we made the hard decision to say okay this might be the last game we're making but we're going to make it the best game we can and pulled all our money into it and so every most people on that picture were basically terminated at that time we knew that we would not be able to work together if things went wrong except for everybody who was involved in the console port um they would have to stay um and hopefully would have made a new project in that time but it was a very bad feeling of course uh luckily our CEO worked his ass off during that time and he came through and and made a very good deal a follow-up deal and of course Publishers always wait a little bit when they had release a new game to see how it's doing and Shadow tactic did well so we managed to get a deal and on 23rd of December he sort of wrote us the email when everybody was at home with their families that things are fine we're

going to be alive um and this was in January where we sort of met in the center of Munich we're from Munich Germany and burned all the paper work and again got very very drunk so this is all I'm going to say about the business whatever side the rest is going to be design I hope that you know Shadow tactics if you don't this might be a very see I'm not a very good artist um if you do not know Shadow tactics I'm going to quickly explain it but this talk might be a little boring for you um um so in Shadow tactics it's a stealth game from a top down isometric whatever perspective and you're playing as a gang of five characters um it's playing in IDU Japan and basically there are huge Maps filled with hundreds of enemies and you have to combine the skills of your characters to sort of get through there and take out all the enemies or ghost your way through which is a lot harder um the main mechanic we use for that is sort of a View Vision cone thing uh where you have a bright

area and a dark area and in the bright area you always get detected and in the dark area you can Crouch through it and feel stealthy like a ninja and if this is familiar for anyone this of course is all ripped from Commandos uh which is our big inspiration uh the command series and the Desperado serious but this is a quick disclaimer now I love those games and if I'm going to say anything bad about the old games it's purely analytical I'm not trying to make them look bad okay so except for some of them they were not that good uh so this is Commandos one uh it's that the add-on for Commandos one is our favorite game of the whole genre and the genre died about 10 or 15 years ago and we sort of had to find out why before we made another entry in the genre because maybe people just didn't want to play this anymore right we had to find out so we played the games and we dug into feedback and all that and it pretty quickly became clear that the the height of the genre basically was after Commandos one was released there was Commandos 2 and Desperados one which very good games and this was sort of the

best moment for real-time tactics um and then everything started to go downhill and for each of the series it was something different for the Commando series it was that they wanted to go more cinematic and they always had aity for movies the Commandos 2 is full of movie missions there are sort of like movies and in Commandos 3 they pushed that quite a lot they had things like parachute troops coming in and things surprising you and everything being cinematic and scripted but that's not really what you want a tactical game right you want to be able to not be surprised to sort of deduct everything that's going on know what's going on especially in a Jour like this and they sort of Lost That by going very cinematic and the Desperado serus went into some weird things where you could go into first person and start shooting people and that just went very horribly and for the nail in the coffin basically then was Commando Strike Force which was a shooter game um I never played it I actually don't know if it's bad or good but people were very angry

about the game because it wasn't what they wanted to have anymore and so we realized the genre didn't die because people don't want to play it anymore it was because there was nothing for them to play and that's when our idea of Shadow tactics became a lot more real uh and we knew what we had to make and we also knew that we had to make the game like Commandos one two and Desperados one and not the other games so let's get into Shadow tactics these are the characters we have in the game I'm going to give you a quick rundown of them on the left you have mugan he's sort of the big brutish Samurai guy who can take out multiple enemies at once next to him Is AO she's a kunichi um she's a female ninja she can disguise uh and then walk freely amongst guards which is very powerful and Aiko and mugan sort of have a thing going um then in the center we have hayatu he's the generic archetype ninja dude with a shuriken um and he's very versatile and agile next to him is the fan favorite I guess her name is Yuki and she's a she lost her parents in the war and grew up on the streets and

she's a little bit crazy but in a funny way so that's why people like her I guess and then we have takuma who's sort of from a mechanical standpoint the odd ball I'm going to talk about that in a little bit um and on his on his head it's it's Kuma that's the pet Tanuki he has it's his distraction so I think that characters are the area where we most succeeded in the game um they are the most important part of the game and the decisions we made really worked out and so I'm going to talk about those a little bit when we looked at the old games we identified two problems s they had with their character design the first one is this guy this is the driver from Commandos one um and anyone who played Commandos one might know what I'm getting at um the driver was used for one thing only and that's driving Vehicles so and you don't drive many vehicles and Commandos so what would happen is you would take your cool characters like the Green Beret clear the whole map feel awesome with the Green Beret everybody's dead and then there's a car and then you're like ah the driver and you pull the driver the whole map up and it just gets on the car and drives off and so he's like a key

right he's not mechanically interesting character and not someone you use very much he's just a key so this sort of became a design term for us like characters shouldn't be drivery or the driver we he's the epit term of failure for us in character design in these games and the next one I'm going to teach you a German word today one that is very German um there you go it's it's a typical German thing um I'm going to translate that literally for you it me means laying wool milk Pig this is my interpretation of an egg laying wool milk Pig um it's an animal that does it all right and in the Commando series there's usually one character in every game that does it all the Green Beret he's he can carry bodies he can th use his knife to kill guards he has a great distraction and we thought that's pretty cool we want all our characters to be so that's what we did basically um we developed a system where every character would have a certain type of skill and it was important that each each of them had

one the main first thing of course is the melee kill uh each character has one and you can already see that takuma sort of is the Oddball because he has a grenade which is not very stealthy um as a melee kill but whatever I'm going to talk about that in a bit um and they are all basically the same but we we changed the balancing so that for example Yuki who's not very good at this sort of thing has a very messy kill animation it takes very long time so you have to use her differently but it's important that they all can do it right maybe someone is better in a certain situation but they all can do the melee kill the next skill is very important it's the special as we call it and this is sort of the skill that describe what the character is um and this is if you talk about the character when I described them to you previously this is what you talk right if you tell a friend this is the type of skill you're going to talk about for hayatu it's the shuriken for Yuki her trap that she can lure people in mugan the swordwind attack where he just obliterates everyone around him it's not limited to three what people think you can kill all the guards in the map with it um then we

have iiko she has a distraction as that skill which is rather special it's the disguise ability and um the snipe ability of takuma and while people might think that this is the most important skill for a character it's actually not it's most important one for the vision of a character but for gameplay the most important skill is the distraction uh by far because the distraction is the skill that you use to interact with the system of the game right the kill is just a kill it's very binary but with the distraction you can sort of break up the enemy setups and and draw guards away and sort of I had to say a bad word there sorry um can mess with the setups that we build and it was very important that the distractions felt different because they really Define how you play a character this is the most important skill a character has um just to give you a simple example if I use Yuki's whistle to whistle a character away it doesn't really matter if I kill him with a shuriken if I stab him if there's a trap if there's a mugan doing his sword thing it doesn't matter right the important part was that I could draw him out with the with the whistle so they are

actually the most important skill in the game each character has a gun um and I'm going to quickly talk about the role of guns in the game um many many games and also the old ones the Desperados and Commandos did something where they had infinite ammo and you could basically start shooting at any time and just draw all the guards on the map to your and just kill them and we didn't like that and we also realized that we would never be able to create good gun gameplay mechanics uh and a good stealth mechanics at the same time so what we decided was that we will just not do shooting and shootouts in a big way so our guns are more like stealth guns they have a very small range of audio or noise so people don't hear them as much and but you have very limited amount of ammunition and the role is basically that if you're stuck in some sort of setup and you don't know what to do and you just can't figure it out you just use your guns shoot everyone in that one setup and then you can move along so it's basically a joker or a small cheat that you have um and they all have a health pack but whatever

so the important part about this was that we made a system where every character has each type of skill and the one that is most driver like I guess would be takuma because he can't carry birdies he cannot climb he cannot kill anyone but he's extremely powerful aside from that um all of his skills are very strong the Tanuki is the strongest distraction in the game the grenade the normal one is not as good but you can switch it to a stun grenade which is completely overpowered and um yeah the SN is just strong all right so that's enough for characters I'm going to do sort of a deep dive into one game design topic between each of these broader topics um it's supposed to be a warp Vortex but it looks more like a snake a snail I'm sorry all right for this one I'm going to talk about Shadow mode which is a prominent feature in the game something that's very important to us is that you're playing a team right this was one of the pillars we had you shouldn't feel like there's individuals running around it should be like a team that is working together because this sort of is different from any stealth

games where you're just by yourself usually and so what we thought of in the beginning is that we make team actions which would be like two characters working together and creating this new skill and this would be true for every character every character combination would have their own team action um Desperados did that in one of their sequels it did not work out for them and I know why now because we tried it as well um the problem with this is that team actions add a lot of complexity to the game it's it's hard enough already I mean every character has two skills you have to learn right the distraction and the special and that is hard enough for people already they would it would take them a long time to really get the hang of how to use a character now imagine if we add five to 10 skills on top of that that are just very situational you can't even use them all the time and you have to try to learn those and and really use them that was not going to work um and the second one was that we had a couple of good examples for Team Action for example we had the idea that uh Aiko could use mugan sort of as act like he's her husband and sort of shuttle him through enemy Vision because they

wouldn't think he's suspicious or mugan could bunk up other characters and help them climb like a ladder um but it sort of stopped after that and we would have needed 10 or more so yeah we scrapped that and we did the planning mode thing that also existed in Desperados it was a little hard to use because the controls were not as tight um and they are for us as well but the idea behind the planning mode is if you don't know it is that you can plan one action for each character you have um um and then have them executed at a later time together or separate and this is very important for game plad controls we knew from the beginning that we're going to do a console version so we worked on game plad controls from the beginning and this is very different because you control the character directly right it's very immersive in that case so um on a computer you could simply just send a character somewhere and give do something else with another character but on the control on the game pad you can't like because you have to control control the character yourself so Shadow

mode becomes very important if you're playing with a Gamepad and what it turned out to be is sort of a do-it-yourself Team Action and it was brilliant because we didn't have to teach you any new skills you could basically use the skills that you already knew combine them make the game feel like a team game and voila everything wrote out well and I think this is also the some of the most powerful moments in the game are when you pull off a successful Shadow mode so that worked out well and something that often comes up is the question why we only have one action that you can save and why not infinite actions it would be so much cooler uh we actually had that and during the devopment and it had a couple of problems it was pretty awesome I have to admit it like if you saw people just doing these insane things where they would make insane cues and chains of I throw a shuriken there I walk over there I use my stone the shuriken I pick it up again the cool down go they would do Insane things and basically clear parts of the whole map just in Shadow mode um and that was fun but that's not how we want you to play our game in our game a very important

aspect is the real-time aspect and it's the aspect of execution uh you cannot just plan like an a turn-based game but you have to execute as well and if Shadow mode is that powerful you don't have to execute anymore you just plan it and you look and see what happens and the other one was that the more complexity the feature had the more tools players wanted to work with it so they wanted timelines where they could rearrange the actions they had said or they wanted a pause function where they say you walk there and then you wait 3 seconds and then you do this action and that would have been a nightmare from all sort of standpoints so we didn't do it and the lesson we learned is that less is more wow big lesson I guess nobody heard that before but the big part that was new for us was the fact that what we actually had was fun right it was not something where you just have this huge pile of features where lot of stuff is added on and somebody's coming yeah you should do less that would be better it was it was fun it was very good thing and there's games who have this planning mode thing as their main

mechanic but it just wasn't our game so we had to cut it out and the game is better for it let's talk about level design um I could talk a lot about that it's going to be rather short though because there's a lot going on in this talk um this is the Mission 8 of The Game and as you can see the map is very big you are this big um if you can't see it this is you and so what is very important if you have a mission where people spend one to 4 hours on um is that the mission is cool um as soon as the mission is bad or boring they're probably going to stop playing your game because they know they have to spend a couple of hours on that mission and they also have to be very unique and this is sort of the first big thing that we wanted to do and this is something that Commandos too does the best I guess they have very unique settings and great Maps so we took that inspiration and the idea is basically that you can if you and a friend have played the game this is sort of a test you can make to see if your maps are unique um if you can describe to them a mission with one or two words and they

know which one you're talking about instantly then it's probably unique enough and the important thing about this is that we did also not want you to get into a new map and realize it's the same thing again and you know you have to play that for two hours now so that was very important that things look differently I'm going to talk about that a little bit more later when I talk about pacing um another big thing was the emotional state that we want you to be in if you play a mission this is very high level but it's important to know that like if you want to be consistent um so if you open up the mission you're very very happy that everything is new it's looking gorgeous you're scrolling over the whole map you're like oh wow this is beautiful look at that Landmark look at this nice Building look at this and then it sort of Dawns to you of you that you have to actually play all of this and you see things like oh my God there's three Sam Samurai over there there's a huge Patrol of guys how am I ever going to and you want to quit but then you're like okay no I can do this uh I've bet certain Miss before I can do this one as well and then you enter in

the emotional core Loop of our game which is basically utter despair into happiness into I can do this and many quick saves and maybe rage quits in between and in the end you feel like a god you're in a purple cloud of puffiness and uh you're very happy and the big thing is that you can scroll over the whole map that you have actually just completed and see everything that you've done and this is important and this is very very good um and we want that we could have done more in that department I think we could have added like to the stats screen some sort of Replay function where you can just see what actually happened and you did this there and you did that that's something we're probably going to do for our next game so yeah um but this is very very important and giving you that feeling of satisfaction in the end so basically every mission is the same as doing a small setup right and I want to talk about openness a little bit and one of our key pillars in the game the level design was that you should be able to play it way everybody should have the

chance to play different things and every puzzle had to play different different approaches and this doesn't only apply to the small enemy setups but also to the whole map this is mission five it's the first mission that we built was sort of our vertical slice um and I think it's one of the best which is awkward because we didn't learn much I guess um but in the beginning it's very linear you get up to this gate and then the mission basically opens up and you can go left or you can go right and the briefing tells you this right it tells you there's two paths and something that's very important if you're designing for openness is that you actually show players the paths uh if you have 20 pass but they're all obfuscated and you like yeah the player has to be clever and find them then they won't look and they won't find them and they won't realize that this is a open game and they will think it's linear so what we always try to do is something like this t-shape where we say okay you can go left you can go right and also be aware of the fact that you are not losing content if they are not playing the other part the choice is only meaningful because they don't get to play the part right if they would end up

in the same thing anyway there wouldn't be a choice and the game wouldn't feel open or good at all plus you can always have replayability if the player chooses to play this Mission again they will choose the other path and have a completely different experience and there also are obious skated paths in this Mission uh you can just go straight ahead and climb up the building but most people don't find that but it's cool because uh if you play it replay it you might find that you might feel clever you don't tell it to you in a briefing and we do sort of that sort of stuff a lot um I want to talk about bottlenecks because if everything was very open and you didn't have any bottlenecks then the game would be very boring especially ours because people could just sneak through everything and leave everything behind um so how do we do bottlenecks and how do we make them still fun and not feel frustrating so the first thing that we do is basically bottlenecks always revolve around takuma or mugan who cannot climb or Swim so you always have to drag them through sort of and in this case this is the bottleneck you have to get takuma to this Sniper Tower on the left but he cannot swim so he has

to go over that thing and what's important here is that while it is a bottleneck to get Tuma there you have infinite possibilities with your other characters on how to solve that thing you can swim around the whole island you can get out anywhere you want to and approach the setup in a very very open way and there are multiple solutions to it so it doesn't really feel like a bad bottleneck where you're like I have to do this now um it still feels open and you can be creative so yeah that's enough for for level design let's do another Deep dive thing um something that we learned which is also pretty obvious I guess for many people but is about how people approach problem solving in your game so we have a player and the player faces a problem in our case usually a setup of some guards and there is this assumption players have on how they are approaching a problem in our game because it's called Shadow tactics it's a tactical game right you have strategy you're in this view in this RTS view where you can see everything so people think that they're actually approaching problems very holis ically and checking everything out and then narrowing it

down and then starting to work but that is not what they're doing in reality they do this they see a guard and this is the circle is sort of the Tactical Horizon things they actually see see and they just go in and kill the guard and then they get seen and they quickload and they see okay this guy is in there so they add that guy to their Horizon sort of and they keep doing that over and over until they have actually understood how the setup Works um and it is very important to understand that because they might tell you that they are playing very strategically but they are usually not I'm sure that many people are but many weren't and what this meant for our level design was that we had to make sure that things are not too far away from the center of attention that you're actually playing in uh for example we don't have large patrols that are going like many minutes around the map um because that would just be bad you would play the game and then suddenly they would come in and screw everything up for you um and we try to have guards close to each other and this is doesn't work all the time but uh we tried doing that

and another thing we did here was that we cleared off the areas very clear so uh uh you cannot see from one area into the other you can always rely on the fact that if you are in one area guards from another area will not uh disturb you at least most of the time so the lesson we learn here is that what people tell you about how they approach problems in the game is not really true and we thought about why this is the case in our game and it's very clear we could have seen that from the beginning because Shadow tactics is very iterative right you we teach you to Quick safe all the time so there's basically no punishment for failure the game screams that at you it's like just try things out you the quickload time is very low just keep going and of course they don't think holistically and and watch everything because they don't have to right and it's in our core mechanics and we could have seen that earlier story I'm going to drink something real quick so the most important rule we had for our story was that the plot

is not important but the characters are important and the plot had to work with many many restrictions uh from a game design and level design standpoint I'm going to talk about that in a bit so it's structured very simple and it had to facilitate certain things it's basically the Shogun is fighting kagama who's this ominous bad guy you don't know who he is and the important part here is that the Shogun can send you anywhere because uh we have these missions where you're a mountain toop it's winter oh you're at a lake it's summer and there is it's impossible to tell a story that feels like a journey very much if you have a structure like that that's what I talked about with the different settings before that we want every map to feel fresh and new this is a big hit for the story right uh you cannot do certain things then and that's why we and also the characters that you have in a mission are not defined by the story they are very much defined by the pacing so the writer can't just say yeah I want this character to be here because he will not be there so we did this mostly in cut scenes the

plot thing um between the missions you get a cut scene and that's that but the most the more important part of Storytelling that we had is about our characters and how we talk about them the first thing we do is we have something like we call context dialogues it's sort of a dialogue that either triggers if you walk into a volume with a player character or if you do an action you kill a guard whatever then these banra things trigger and they are very weird because we're in Ido Japan this is very early and they sort of have Skype they can just talk to each other over the whole map and some people are offended by that and they don't like it but realize that people want your characters to talk to each other so they will have a lot High suspension of this belief if something like this happens if you do it right and we had certain things that we had to change and had to work into the game that would um make this less awkward for example when a character walks into a trigger volume and one of these dialogues triggers it's always that correct character that starts talking so every dialogue is written in a way that there's a

beginning line for each character in The Mission and then the dialogue will go on and this way it feels less awkward because sort of you are initiating the dialogue and it's not someone screaming at you from 400 meters away and this worked out really well I think and we got a lot of character things across with that and the personalities and the other one is um we call them player barks um barks are many things so you might not call them that in your studio but it's when you select the character what they say when you use a shiken or whatever this this work work uh yes my Lord stuff from Warcraft 3 would be an example of that and we try to use that for storytelling and something I haven't seen as much and I wonder why because it's it's like the best way to do it um something very bad happens at some point during your story and you're after that for two missions we sort of completely swap the dialogue lines your characters say if you uh if you use them and make them walk around or use skills because they're depressed right because it would be very awkward if you have like depressed dialogue

where he's like oh my God I'm so sad this is so bad and then you select him he's like yes sir I'm going to do that it's it doesn't feel right right and I think we could have done a lot more with that um use that changing this stuff up a little more we did it a little bit with there's a snow map they might say things like there's snow in my armor but um I think from an emotional standpoint this is a very underused tool in RTS like games that you can do very much with pacing I'm realizing I'm talking very fast so I might slow down a bit um I don't see much uh about pacing so this might be very very basic and you might get bored now but um it's an important thing to me and also for our game so I wanted to talk about it and if anybody of you is into that stuff like pacing with the whole game talk to me I want to learn I want new things so shots is about 25 hours long and the big fear I had all the time was that people would

get bored halfway through because there is not very much in the game actually we have three enemy types right and they are basically all the same they just react differently but they don't have different weapons or huge different behaviors in the beginning we had concepts of guards like that would maybe gun around with torches and sort of burn the bushes you're hiding in and Ninja characters that hide in bushes and we cut all of that nothing of that made it into the game so it's very simple and we only have three guard types so it's not much variety coming from that right then we have five characters but we introduced them in the first throw of the game and they do not change at all there is no progression there's no leveling up there's no skills that you can choose it's just the same character from start to finish so how are we going to keep the player interested for 25 hours or more um and the first big thing we did is that we invented sort of well we didn't invent them we stole them from Commandos and so on but and we had these high impact features that completely changed the gameplay the core gameplay and the one of them is nighttime where

you the lights become very important the Shadows become important which is something that is irrelevant on most Maps um on day maps I mean and then you have the footprint mechanic where snow is lying and guards can see your Footprints and they will follow you up and this really changes how you play a mission a lot and we had these two things we thought about others like adding fog of War maybe to some missions which sadly never made it something I want to try but there's technical limitations with that and it's difficult of war and a view cone right because the guard you cannot see the guard but he can see you so that would have been very bad um so we did this thing and we we paced these out very carefully I'm going to show you that in a minute and we try to not overuse them and then we have some sort of story high points in a mission where they usually mechanically the missions where we have these big assassinations like you kill Koto you kill uh you yabu or kagama in the end there is not much going on from a mechanical standpoint we don't introduce new features we don't introduce new characters they're

just like you learned stuff now use it and kill this guy but you have an emotional High Point there because it's story-wise it's pretty cool so this is important for pacing as well um especially balancing these two things against each other um we had these graphs that I sadly didn't bring because I thought I would be a lot slower um and didn't have time for it so that basically the idea was that we have these high impact features like this or introducing a character and we would assign a value to that right and then we would see in every Mission how many high impact features are there how many medium impact features are there for example puddles that you can go into that make a noise they don't change the game completely but they change it up a bit and so we get this value um and then we can make a graph out of that and see how much is going on from a mechanic standpoint in every Mission it's good for tutorial stuff and also just to see how the pacing turns out and then you base that against how the excitement of the player is when he just opens the mission or if the story does something crazy so you balance these out with each other and then you get a nice pacing so

this is the the Exel file we used it's actually pretty simple uh there's not much going on um but I still want to just go over it um probably you guys have much more complex stuff uh but we'll see this is the setting stuff I talked about earlier um as you can see we tried to paste them out there is a bunch of Village settings in the middle uh but they are very very different uh one of them is very snow it's raining it's a very bad mood one of them is the fifth Mission I showed you before and they are sort of yeah they're different so don't get fooled by that um you can see there's the moon down there which I might show you at the end um and yeah we try to be very careful with the settings uh to past them out in a way that it always felt fresh and you didn't play in the same area or the same visual style for too long um and never One mission after the other this is the night and the snow gameplay um you can see we don't use it that often and we usually Pace it at a point where you don't get a new character or anything else um if there's

not much going on then you we introduce something like snow or we introduce something like uh the Night gameplay in the Lake Village and we do this once twice and then once and twice again and then we have a mission with both uh and that's it we don't try to push it we don't try to overuse it because then the feature would get old and boring and this is the most important thing we had for pacing it's the characters that you have an a mission and people always want to choose their own characters for a mission they want to be like yeah I want to this would add so much depth right I could choose the game and play the game in very different ways but what would actually happen is that normal players would just stick to what they know they would just ch choose the character they like the most and then the game would get boring very quickly so it's very important that we have the power to sort of you have hay two missions and you get used to a skill set and boom we take them away and you have to sort of deal with that and that is the most important tool of pacing we have and if you can find something like that in your game where you sort of can control how the game plays extremely well like this and

then use that feature it's the best thing you have and what you can see is that we have only two missions that actually uh have the same character setup so well you can't really see it because it's very confusing uh I had to count that like five times myself to not lie to you but it's only these two missions and next to that you can see the mission objectives we try to balance those out as well that you don't have like three assassinations missions in a row and while they mostly are the same that you always have to get to some point point and do something um it's still important that the vision and the feeling the player has is very different in each Mission and on the right you can see some play time we also put like the thing is a lot bigger I just cut it down and this is the first play through and the second play through from the team whatever it's not really relevant so the last Deep dive I have right now um it's about one of the most important features in the game which is the quick save um we were very very afraid uh regarding the quick save because we thought that it's a very old school type of thing

it's very retro and we didn't know how especially reviewers would react to it right what they think it's a it's bad design that we didn't really do our job properly because you don't do that anymore right the the safe scumming thing um and we got afraid and we sort of thought about features that we could Implement that would sort of remove the quick save like we knew we would have it but we tried to make it less important um for a long time during development and an example for this is like the biggest story of the design failure we have on the game it's called Freeze mode uh it never shipped obviously and we worked on that for about a year I think and we had so many iterations the basic idea was this once you get seen we don't want you to quickload we want to give you a second chance right you can maybe just keep playing uh we don't want the game to end because especially Commandos one was very very brutal in that regard and it's not that much fun for many players there's some who like that but they can play on Hardcore and the idea was that you when once you get seen the game freezes freeze mode and you can choose that you can teleport somewhere

the idea was sort of that the ninja is using his smoke grenade and just disappears Into Thin Air which is pretty cool move um it had multiple problems the first one is that if players get seen in our game they usually get very excited and they start clicking really fast and try to get away or something and this is not when you want to freeze the game and force them to do a controlled input because they will not uh they will just click through it and then they teleported somewhere and they don't know what happened and they were very frustrated um we could have fixed that I guess through input stuff but the basic principle of if someone is agitated you forced them to make a controlled input that just doesn't work um so and we had that problem for all the iterations of the feature and the second big problem was I have to mention by the way that many of you might think well why didn't you just put a revine time feature in the game that would solve all the problems uh we talked about that and then we realized we cannot do that because it's very hardcore from a technical standpoint and would take a

lot of our budget and also we didn't want a rewind time mechanic just to facilitate the quick safe thing right would have needed a lot more mechanics to work into that and make it a game about rewinding time like the gamees about rewinding time R um yeah but back to the problems with the freeze mode so the first problem was that as I said before people just clicked through it and the second problem was that it added just a lot of complexity and possibilities to abuse um because people would get seen in it and then they would try to teleport somewhere advantageous for them so they would sort of skip part of our gameplay and get seen on purpose which is definitely not what you want um so we had to fix that in a way and we made many iterations of that at some point you could only teleport back on a line where you would have been walking before and just sort of go back um but none of it worked and it always had the same problems and so we ended up just yeah cutting the whole thing well we didn't cut the whole thing we were going down this Rabbit Hole of of adding new stuff changing stuff changing we didn't really see what was going on anymore and

at some point our creative director came by and he was like guys we should fix this and so we sat down in a room and we walked out of that room with a simple realization that we just put a slow motion there uh because the slow motion does everything we want right uh it gives the player time to think they when they get seen it doesn't really everything up uh screw everything up completely so they can still think and and react but it also isn't uh making it so they feel like this was a sort of fail safe because there was a problem with the previous systems as well uh players would they were not bulletproof right there were situations where you would get seen and there was no space where you could teleport to safely and if you put a system in your game that screams at the player well I'm going to save you but sometimes I don't then that's not a good idea and the slow motion doesn't do that the slow motion just says okay you have some more time before you get detected so use that time and it worked very well um I guess so back to to the quick save um this was sort of the point where we realized that

we should maybe embrace the idea that this is a game of a quick save and not try to obfuscate it so we added things like the quick save timer this is a timer that pops up after one minute of gameplay and sort of screams at you and says like one minute right we want you to save often and screams at you and says save the game and after 2 minutes it gets orange and screams even louder and just gets you can turn that off if stuff like annoys you but um we could have done that a lot more hardcore I think many people just don't see it anyway but we did sort of stuff like this right we went into that route of embracing the quick safe and if you play the tutorial of the game you just walk around and there's some quick save quick save tutorial is popping up all the way I think there are six in the first five minutes of the game or something because realize it's important and the lesson that we learned from this was basically if this is part of the core of your game you just embrace it don't try to push it away because this will always fail right you cannot remove it from the core of from your game it's the core so embrace it and then people will love it

more because you're being honest about what your game is and that quick save reminder thing got a lot of positive feedback from press and from players they were like this is so cool I never seen this before it's just such a simple thing we only did it because we at some point realized that this is our game and we have to do that so I am going to like in the beginning I was thinking about uh showing you something or making questions but because I talked so so fast uh I can do both so first thank you uh you can reach me through these channels to chat or whatever I'm going to first show you something something and then if you have questions we can we can do that this is going to take some loading time but uh I hope it's worth it because I brought the old prototypes uh of Shadow tactics so you're going to see the

moon no no no this is going to take a while so I'm just going to talk so during development we had three prototypes that oh that's wrong uh three prototypes that we made um that were there we go that we sadly had to cut because as I told you uh we couldn't barely finish the main game oh by the way the performance is going to be horrible because my laptop isn't good but it's not a problem um yeah we had to sadly cut those DLCs this was the first idea that we had for how you should enter the game and everything would be on this map in a planning mode it's very ugly of course because this is Alpha right this is our Alpha Milestone and okay let's see the moon we had three DLCs one of them was a ship DLC whatever then we had a story DLC which was pretty awesome the idea was that the characters get together in a Tavern and they drink and get drunk and they talk about stories of of missions they had and you sort of have it a little bit like Bastion where you get back in time and you play and they talk over it and the twist idea behind that was that mugan is

talking about the easiest mission he ever had um where you play as mugan all the time wow beautiful you eye right um you play as mugan all the time but all the other characters sort of worked around him and uh cleared that up and you get to play both of those but this is the bigger DLC we had it's the moon so the pitch behind the DLC was uh that let's see yeah there we go that space Shogun is trying to sort of carve his face into the Moon so you can always see his face at night uh because he was very entric I guess uh and our characters didn't like that so they decided to take a spaceship and kick his ass basically um the big like we wanted the DLC from a business standpoint to explain what the hell is going on here and we wanted a DLC that could make press like that was very crazy and where people like oh wow like if you release it a couple of months after the game they were like oh I'm going to get back into Shadow tactics they have the moon right um that was sort of the idea behind it and yeah you can see it's very janky with the performance um then we had some

ideas like what can you do in space we reverse gravity so you can only jump upwards uh and have to take ladders to go down this was very bad we cut that from the like we made two versions of this map and we cut that in the second one because it just wasn't intuitive and it felt completely stupid and then we have like drones flying around you can see here making light so there was some cool stuff going on this is by the we had all the assets Built For This there just weren't textured there's a lot of game designer level designer art in this so in the center we have this huge shield and there's this this crane thing that they're using to sort of laser the face of the Shogun um you're basically in one of his eyeballs uh this is the huge crater that you're in and you could kill him in two ways either you could kill him by sort of luring him beneath this this laser and killing him there or you could go over there and kill him using drop pods that you could call down and the alarm guards would come drop pods there's a lot of cool stuff you can see I'm a bit sad that we didn't get to

get to do this yeah uh just wanted to show you that because I guess it's fun uh it never saw the day day of light so maybe in the next game we'll do a moon DLC all right uh thank you so if you have any questions then you can ask me hi thanks great talk love the game uh so it's sort of a bonus question first as a big fan of the genre uh are we going to see a sequel maybe in a different setting like you know World War something uh but uh main question is uh sadly about the business part a little bit as a as a you know gamer who was waiting for the Revival of the genre uh because it seemed to me I was aware about of the game since its announcement because you know I was hoping for for it but it seemed like initially the game got very little visibility maybe from

the publisher as well and sort of after a while became this cult hit that people knew was very good that it started selling that's what at least the steam spy data seem to suggest the community kind of exploded people started talking about it so if you can share any anything about that part that would be interesting sure uh so regarding the first part we actually it's a small anecdote but we have time uh it's we went to Barcelona to visit pyro or at least gono who was sort of the director of the first Commandos games and he played Shadow tactics and he loved it very much and that was very important to us we were very happy about it but the Commander's IP is a very difficult IP to get so that is most likely not going to happen and um regarding the second question so yeah we don't really we're not good at marketing and marketing is hard and you need a lot of money or clever ideas I guess to do that and we knew that the game was very good and for some reason it like didn't get traction very much we

had a very early trailer but it wasn't very good so that didn't do much and I think the big biggest marketing asset that we actually had was the demo like we said there's a free demo of the game and we released that one or two weeks before the game and that's when it sort of started to kick in but then it game takes a while to play it takes a while to get into so press would also they didn't really release reviews on the first day because we didn't send it to them early enough I guess plus there was things like The Last Guardian coming out that some people might have been waiting for or Final Fantasy 15 um small games they don't directly fight with our game but still um and so I guess that word to mouth was basically the main thing that helped us then the game was good and then people talked about it you could always tell your friend that hey there's a free demo right you just you don't have to buy it just because I tell you you can always get the demo and you can start playing and I think this is the biggest best thing we did for marketing that probably helped Elevate the game in the second and in the long run because they could just play it and you can try it one tip regarding demos if you're doing a demo for

PS4 be sure that it's a demo and not a trial they have this weird thing where if you make your game and you can basically upgrade the game to the full version which we thought was pretty cool then you don't have to download it again or whatever it's a trial and it will not be visible in the demo section it will actually not be visible anywhere so um don't do that uh make it a demo which might suck but yeah thanks hi uh so I lived in Japan for over 15 years and because of that I tend to be um a little bit allergic to things media that portrays Japan from in the west right um and and I've been really impressed with with the game and including like the voiceovers and all that and so I'm wondering how is it you got it so right I mean do you have somebody from Japan on the team or how did you do that yeah that was a big big process we did not have anyone from Japan on the team but we had someone who studies Japanese culture from Munich we had him come over and check out the game and and give us mostly feedback on stuff like the way they talk to each other or

visual stuff like how much stone that they used when they built their houses and we did a lot of research into that and it's not that easy because like it's way back and then it's also Japan so you don't find as much here um but we try to do a lot there one of the biggest topics of discussion we had for a long long time was if wagons had two or four wheels back then and how that that was an ongoing thing um so yeah this is the level detail you get down to at some point and uh yeah it was it was tough and I'm I hope I'm glad that you say that we did it well because you never really know because if you ask a Japanese person they will tell you yes but maybe not um because they're very polite and we are actually releasing it in Japan as well now um so hoping to get some more feedback there regarding that topic yes hey um so great game May I'll think I'll finish it one day since it's pretty big but um hypothetically if you were to do a SQL

um how would you handle like the number of characters because right now it seems that the number of characters is quite good for the challenges that you have and it seems that if you added new characters you would have to add specific challenges just for that new character to the formula so uh in what way would you look into like expanding the features of the game like where it would be environment enemy Focus or actually character focused so we like the number of five characters so we will be sticking to Five Characters for our next game as well we are actually developing a game that is like Shadow tactics right now so this is not a secret yet but uh it's yeah it's not Shadow tactics 2o though um so it is a very difficult topic for us to see how we want to change the thing up and how we want to keep it that way because we don't want to take away too much from what made the game great we also don't want it to feel like a simple copy paste thing and that is very hard to do so our

current approach is that we have characters that are similar to The Shadow Tactics characters and we have characters that are completely new uh but it's still five characters so we had to take some of the stuff out that we had in Shadow tactics and we also try to do stuff with the environment as you said like this is I can't really talk about the feature yet but it's pretty cool um it's about how you navigate environment and um make the maps feel more real like real places this was a big thing that we're trying to focus on in the next one hope it works yeah anyone else no yes awesome talk thanks thanks oh that sounded weird um I have uh two questions if that's cool um one so swimming seems uh extremely powerful like what were the sort of conversations that led to it uh being that way well uh we had in the beginning we had systems where you could hold your breath only for a certain amount of time and then we realized that

this was very complicated and weird because we had to make behavior for the guards shooting into the water and what they would do if they see you in the water because they can't really react to that and then we decided Well we just use the small uh things the the the straw things to Bamboo for the for the ninjas to breathe under water it's very ninja and very cool and just have infinite uh thing and the water is powerful but we try to use it clever and level design so we know that you can always get get away through the water but it's balanced in a way that you will usually take one hit from a g before you get into the water so this was sort of a way of of balancing that uh yeah cool um and secondly what were the triggers that um determine when the music changes um well it's just rather simple environment triggers that we place in the environment or level events when we say okay you have killed two or four of the four Gods you have to kill and we are adding new layers to the system we actually have some pretty cool audio stuff going on in the game for example if you perform an like the tracks are

very basic but if you perform an action with one of the characters each of them has an instrument attached to them and if you sort of do something with mugan you will have these Cotto drums uh playing something and whatever it is if you do something with with hayatu I don't know what his instrument is Yuki is a flute obviously so you sort of nobody realizes that it's in the game but you're sort of building the soundtrack by playing the game um through these Stingers that we have and yeah the audio guy filipo he's shout out to philipo he's great and he did a did a great job on it I think thanks thank you okay any more no cool then thanks so much for coming out and think of doing the rating thing this is my first talk at GDC I would be very happy if you guys wa it thank you