You won’t find all the secrets in TUNIC, here is why

hello and welcome to light map from sifa my name is Jan and my co-host on this episode is Fiona thanks for joining me Fiona thank you for having me it's great to be here our guest on light map is Andrew shise who's the primary developer of a game called tunic which is a fantasy adventure with some Zelda styling Andrew thank you so much for joining us I'm so happy to be here thank you for having me Andrew what is Tunic tunic is an isometric action adventure about a tiny fox in a big world where you explore the Wilderness fight monsters and find Secrets I love that so much The Legend of Zelda is an obvious uh inspiration you can really see the look of it there um can you tell me why yeah absolutely it it tunic wears a lot of its influences on its sleeve some of them are buried a little bit deeper but usually when people look at the game for the first time they say this looks like Zelda uh and that's understandable you know you're a little fox you're wearing green you uh maybe maybe you find a sword maybe you find a shield and you're exploring a big sunshiny world trying to you know find secrets in places what's around that corner what's what's coming next um and there's a reason for that like I I love that game um it's it sort of represents to me not just you know it's a cool game in and of itself but it also represents that era of games where you could just be dumped into a world and not know what is expected of you or what is out there really um you know it's uh hearkens back to an Era I think of um you know getting getting a rental cartridge or something and not really knowing much about the game just throwing it in and suddenly being tossed into this world that you know you don't really understand its rules entirely you know maybe you have an instruction manual that came with it but you don't understand everything it says because it's either in a language you don't understand or you're five and don't know all the words yet um and so that's really why the core inspiration for tunic came from um The Legend of Zelda and other games like that you know can you tell me about some of those newer more modern games that you've worked into into tunic as well the uh there are a few touchstones I think with the soul series uh and one sort of broadly is mechanical and it draws a few things from from that game like uh you know how the state of the world works if you open a door but then die the door stays open but if you rest at a checkpoint monsters come back you know there's there's some amount of threat to perishing although you can recover that these sorts of things there's a you know a stamina meter although it works quite differently in tunic the reason for that is that early on I thought I mean and embarrassingly because this is a thought that many people had and have had is uh what if you know this beloved classic was implemented with uh more Modern Combat sensibilities um and originally tunic was adhered to that a little bit more closely and over the years sort of refined and found its own thing there you know like the stamina bar is not a traditional um solian stamina bar or anything like that so there are there are some mechanical elements and we can we can talk more about that if you like but the other side of it is um sort of an emotional one I think and it is the same feeling as we talked about with the Legend of Zelda you know you do feel like you are you know plopped into a strange World in those games a lot of the time not really knowing what's out there aside from a there's treasure B there's terrible things that want to kill you and just sort of like making your way through this place seeing what you can see Finding what you can find and knowing that you're experience is probably going to be somewhat different from other people because there are secrets that are well hidden enough that you're not meant to find them if that makes any sense is this an experience that you know people who are playing a game in the modern context understand or or is this sort of like a love letter to that time for you yeah totally it's um that I don't think that experience has truly gone away it's just changed and so when we look back at the you know the schoolyard uh story that people tell of you know trading Tales of what you can and can't do you can you know you can go past the end in Mario like what's that all about or people just making stuff up um all those experiences that that sort of like sharing of information still exists to a certain degree it's just that the the barrier then was um well you just you can't know you're you're on the playground and you just need to take that person's word for it um but now because we have access to exhaustive completely comprehensive information about everything um the the barrier exists within us right that's why spoiler warning is such a big thing because people love not knowing things you know as easy it is as it is to get information uh and as much as we talk about you know like wow you can't really make a game with Secrets people just look it up on the internet and it's like well yes but people don't want to do that they like not kn they like figuring things out for themselves and so uh I feel like that experience still exists you know in our in our Discord when people were playing the game and even the demo but but when the game came out folks will come into our our spoiler Channel and and ask oh how do I do this how do I get that and people won't just tell them the answer they'll give them Clues they'll be Cy about it they'll say oh wait have you checked page 23 do you really understand it um you know know uh they'll just you know post an emoji of three flowers or something like that you know they're they're part of the design experience now too like they they get it and they understand that people value that that sort of um feeling of Discovery I really like how the what you were saying there with the community getting on board with the keeping the secrets and encouraging people to figure it out themselves with just a few little hints and tips yeah it's it's really lovely because not only is it it's helpful for the people who are playing the game and getting the tips but it's also heartwarming for the community and the developers to see sort of everybody working together to make this you know fun fun little experience for everybody and the game is absolutely beautiful when it first got announced and the first the trailer first popped up I was blown away with how beautiful it was with its colors and designs can you walk us through with the development of the look of tunic so I I had known that I wanted to make a game about secrets for a long time you know didn't really know what it would look like or feel like or anything like that um but I started experimenting I think I you know I had played Monument Valley and uh uh and some other you know uh games I was playing a a bunch of actually legit of Zelda at the time I as an adult was finishing it finally for the very first time um and trying to think about how a world like that could be represented in uh an isometric world with these sort of very broad gradients of col very careful attention played paid to um you know like concentration of detail and stuff like that and so very early versions of tunic were highly geometric um had these gradients of color not very much in the way of texture though um and it stayed that way for a while but over the years and and it's been a while the game was in development for you know seven years the the style had to change a little bit because uh it's a it's a game about exploring a ruined world and big broad swads of flat color contrast strangely in my eye to ruin things you know things that Fallen apart suddenly the concentration of detail is very strange you have very flat spaces with no detail and then High concentration of detail with you know a crumbled wall or a piece of rubble in the ground or or something like that and so I gradually started adding visual detail like noise you know subtle textures it's it ended up being sort of a trick this uh yeah a little bit um getting in the weeds but the amount of iteration on things like a brick texture took a while because if you make it too realistic suddenly it stands out as like wow what is this very realistic noisy thing with lots of information lots of detail um sticking out in this otherwise flat world and if you remove too much of that detail then suddenly it looks unfinished like there's a you know missing texture or something's hyper smooth when it when it's supposed to evoke this feeling of you know ruined or weathered Stone anyway it's a it was a complex process that took a lot of uh lot of iteration but um it uh yeah rules like how Blades of grass can be placed you know they're always usually in groups of four because if they're just scattered rambly it looks weird so it it sort of has this um uh tries to to stay somewhat uh not realistic but at least um you know visually interesting enough while still staying true to these uh sort of geometric uh Roots have you got any examples of you know when you were iterating on this design and the look of the um you know when you're starting to put a bit more detail into it instead of it sort of almost being uh you know those big flat geometric shapes that you you realized you went too far and had to pair it back um yeah totally it these aren't necessarily like oh no this whole area is too detailed we need to redo it but it's more like uh I'm making a you know a brick wall texture or uh or some you know some paneling somewhere some some marble floors and I add a uh a normal map which is a way of sort of like undulating the surface of something that is actually just flat geometry um so it catches the light and what have you and the game does use some of those but they're very subtle if they were anything more than very subtle it suddenly looked very strange it looked like it was this uh you know very present Deep thing and and I don't know I don't know how to describe it it looked very wrong um and so yeah the trick was just just barely having a little bit of that sort of detail um yeah working on just the the Ubi ubiquitous sort of sandst looking Stone material that's all over the place um there there were versions of that where it was you know could see every you know Fleck of of or Pebble inside it and at a certain point it just was like oh this is no no take it back can you tell us a little bit more about the language in this game there's a secret language you can't understand as it with English as well like I said the the idea with um the language without I mean don't want to go into spoilers too deeply um but the the experience of leafing through something and um not fully understanding is I think very powerful like um this is not specifically an instruction manual example but I remember playing uh Super Mario Brothers when I was a child and getting to The Warp Zone um and for those who aren't familiar Warp Zone the one that I got to at least is at the end of the second level you can sort of go past the end of the level um by you know getting on some platforms and climbing over the top of the exit and you find yourself in a in a strange room and text appears on the screen which is something that doesn't happen really anywhere else in the game and I was like un actual child I had no idea what was going on I I probably had not seen the word warp or Zone before say welcome to Warp Zone um and I was paralyzed it was so exciting you know uh and that feeling of you know putting two two together and not fully understanding something but having it be full of question marks is um is sort of the feeling that I wanted to evoke with the the the the glyph text in the game you know um and I mean the game has been out for a little while and uh if you you know look for anything about tunic on the internet you will probably see that maybe there is some meaning behind that text um and originally that was meant as sort of like an Easter egg you know like ha wouldn't it be neat if it actually meant something uh but it turns out that people really like the game and there are people out there that really like you know doing linguistic analysis or whatever um and have managed to to piece it together and that's very cool to me um that people would want to do that and I think it means that there is I guess another layer uh for the game if if people are interested in in you know digging in deep and discovering more about this world than than it lets on not to go into too much about what this language actually is but can you tell us a little about when you were designing it um what were some of these rules that you use to design a language to communicate something that obviously people on the internet who are very good at this sort can can decipher um is it a is it a straight onetoone swap of of a different language or how does it work sure so I'll uh just on the off chance that someone that's interested in playing this game and likes that sort of thing I won't go into specific details but I will say that um we I I knew at the time when I started working on the game that uh we were living in a postz world and uh I'm sorry if you have not played Fez I might be spoiling a little bit you might know that Fez has a language in it that is a character bych character Cipher for English and uh the beauty of the language in that game in my opinion is that it is so well integrated into the aesthetic of the world that I uh when I first played it didn't really think much of it like oh it's just a it's cool characters on the screen that I'm not supposed to understand please let me play the video game I want to jump around cuz you get this big big dump of it at the beginning and and not much until a little bit later um and so you know there are plenty of people who sort of knew about this or just the sort of person that would you know bust out the frequency analysis tool set the moment they saw a wall of text but I was not one of those people and so the reveal there is that you could have been reading this the whole time and it's actually quite simple to figure out once you sort of have you know seen a sufficient you know number of instances of it um so developing something like that uh in in like I say a post Fez World meant that it couldn't just be a character by character Cipher to English um because anytime people see you know gliph text or or unusual language you know it's like crack your knuckles look for the one that's most frequent that's your e you know it's and the the beans are spilled immediately but having it just be a little bit more obtuse um meant that uh I think that that will happen or has happened less frequently like I said it's a game about making you feel like you you know don't belong that this world isn't made for you and so the that feeling of of trying something that you think is going to work and you know trying to understand the language and and realize well this this is this is above my pay grade there's something going on here that I do not understand is is a is a great feeling to me I love that right I love knowing that there's more to something you know solving puzzles is great but realizing that a puzzle is deeper than you could have possibly imagined is is is more exciting another thing I quite liked in the game was that there was never an explicit go here do this this is your current Mission the G the the levels almost guided you subconsciously to where you need to what you did need to do but also to the point where it feels like you're just exploring uh could you tell us a little bit more about why you designed the levels that way absolutely uh my I I I love getting lost you know uh I love feeling like I'm actually exploring um open world games are great for that sort of thing you know pick a direction and go uh for a a team of the the size of tunic which is very very small it's not really in scope but we tried our best to make sure uh that you know it it felt like you were making some of your own decisions you know uh and that you were truly exploring and if you can't build you know an infinite sprawling world then the best you can do is um at least not railroad the player into a particular path I guess is uh is is one approach and so early on there's a little bit of uh you know funneling uh only and only a little um before you you know get some items that let the world open up a little bit the design of the game or or at least one part of it centers around uh internal terminology we call them uh soft Gates and garden paths and soft Gates or or firm Gates uh are contrasted with hard Gates where you have a uh a requirement that you have the key to go through the door and there are a few of those in tunic but a lot of the other ones are either are knowledge based um like oh I didn't know that I could do this um or I didn't know I could slip behind this corner and get to this place that I am not ready for or find this treasure that I'm quote unquote not supposed to have yet um and uh some of them are uh more about you know um uh skill to a certain extent you know this this monster is way too hard I don't have the techniques or the the upgrades or what have you uh and uh the uh the Garden Path terminology is specifically about that that sort of knowledge-based um uh roadblock where there's just a the isometric perspective affords us the ability to add sort of a little little secret path that you can't normally see but once you know it's there once you've used it a few times you you start to realize that you can get around this world a lot more and all of those things are uh ways to help direct the player in a particular way while keeping the world open and allowing people to discover new things about it because the the feeling of excitement of oh wait here again this place this this was this was here the whole time that's so cool is is a fun feeling and another fun feeling perhaps even more fun is starting to ask yourself wait a second how many of these are there um you've you've mentioned Fez a few times but that was the feeling it sort of brought to me because it was like just a matter of something being outside of your perspective from where you're standing right at this moment but if you look around a corner or if you just push in a corner it even got to the point where if I came across a waterfall and I couldn't walk through it I was a little bit disappointed because there were so many of those around um can you tell me a bit about those hiding these secrets in this world um you know rules that you wanted to have for players um whether or not they were essential or non-essential how did you sort of design that element of it my background before I started working on this game um is uh a genre called hidden object games which are Point click adventure games interspersed with sort of picture find and other sort of um uh you know puzzles and when I was designing those um I actually hearkened back to something that I did as a kid which was designing like point and click adventure games that I never ended up making but I drew the like requirements graph of well you need these two items in order to unlock this door once you unlock this door you get these items and if you explore here from that place you get this item and that can be used together to solve this puzzle right and you have this directed uh graph with no Cycles in it that leads to the end of the game anyway uh I tried doing that for tunic early on you know uh okay sword chop down bushes got it then you can go behind the the waterfall and then you can get this and then you need to get the key get the shield and you need you need this item to get past these enemies and then I wanted to do the thing where it's like well you don't actually need the sword you can maybe do something sneaky and get an item L lets you get past the bushes early but you can only do it once or something like that so well maybe I'll make a dotted line you know maybe that's that's the way that I will Express that in this organizational tool and um oh this enemy is supposed to be really hard you need to have like a couple of hit Point upgrades in order to do it but if you're really good you could get past it so I'll put a dotted line there as well and pretty soon it was a a mess of a document there was no every there was just dotted lines everywhere it didn't make any sense you there was sort of an intended quote unquote path but you could and at a certain point I realized no I'm not going to try and codify things this directly um I am just going to make sure that anytime there is a challenge you know we pay careful attention about to you know is this supposed to be a hard gate or is this something that we want people to sort of be able to sort of stumble their way through and and get into a place where they're not supposed to be um yeah so developing the the tools or and really just the way of thinking about that was was an iterative process for sure now you're the primary developer of tunic what were some of the challenges of wearing so many hats over the years of creating this game so yeah I'll I'll go through the team a little bit just so so folks have a little bit of context for it um I started working on the game in in 2015 and knew fairly early on that I could do plenty of things but there were lots of things that I couldn't do namely uh sound effects and music and in the Prototype that I made I had some very rudimentary generated sound effects that I at the time I thought were you know pretty okay but um you know seven years later I realized that the the work that PowerUp audio specifically Kevin reamy did on it um elevated it a great deal and so I uh Kevin loves secrets and hiding them in video games uh and alternate routes and speedr running and stuff so it was a Natural Choice to to work with PowerUp and I'd been listening a lot to the music of uh Terrence Lee who works under the name life formed he made the soundtrack to dust Force this is a game from a number of years ago as well as um uh the the soundtrack to double find Adventure or double find documentary they they're sort of the piece that that was put together about their journey through making a game and I listened to that album a lot when I was thinking about tunic and and so reached out to Terrence and um later started working with uh Janice Quan as well to make the soundtrack um which you should check out it's phenomenal I can as someone who didn't work directly on it I feel like I can be effusive about it it's uh yeah it's really really special check it out tunic soundtrack um and you know I thought okay well there there's all the bases covered right you've got uh you got music you've got sound and I can I can do the programming and the the level design and the art and the animation the UI and the programming all this stuff um turns out that that's not all you need to make a video game uh so you asked about the challenges one of the challenges is is you know coming to terms with the things that I uh knew I didn't know how to do and now realizing there are plenty of things that I didn't know that I didn't know how to do and a lot of that has to do with you know the business side of things so I partnered with um Felix Kramer and eventually a publisher Fini um was Rebecca and Adam Saltzman on doing sort of all the things that are required for game development that aren't literally pressing the buttons that get built into a binary to distribute people uh you know uh you know contract negotiations uh hiring QA getting ready for shows um merchandise all all these things uh and so that was a yeah an eye openening experience for sure like I knew some sort of business stuff was was required but yeah it's it's a full-time job at least for sure um later on also Eric Billingsley came on to help with um level decoration and uh I say putting the finishing touches on but he was on for you know the past couple of years on the project uh and anyway all of which is to say I have come to respect a great deal you know the the power of having full control over something is fantastic and that was sort of where I came from at the beginning of the project you know I've worked on these projects where somebody else has creative brains what if I had complete control over stuff and the answer is yeah you you can still have creative control over something um while still uh working with other people and having their powerful input uh be reflected in the game as well that was a a a profound moment for me was just having fully described the game to um I it's happened a few times but I remember talking to to Adam Saltzman and just sort of having this multi-hour long discussion and going through the entire design of the game as it stood at the time and then another human being at the end of the conversation being able to ask uh questions about it and understand it and it's like wow you oh you have this in your brain now too that's so cool it's it's very valuable for a number of reasons because it means I can say I think this is a bad idea and someone can say no it's fine you've already implemented it it's good it works don't tear it all down again or someone can say listen I know that you've got your heart set on this I don't think it's ready and you know I can spend more time on it that's that's very valuable um the game is critically overwhelmingly positive it sounds like you've built a community as well that are just loving sharing this game and having people experience it for the first time how does it feel to be uh at this point after seven years of development uh where people love the thing you've made very weird I need to consciously immerse myself in that reality to really make it stick to my brain for any length of time because for you know the better part of a decade now I have been you know working on something and at times you know at times I think oh that's pretty cool I guess but there are a lot of other times where I was convinced that it was an absolute tire fire just hot garbage all around and it is you know that that changed I you know I realized that you know it's a people are playing the game in QA and testing and you know it's come together people are saying it's great but we'll see um and so I have armor built up of anytime anybody says the game is good or I think to myself that maybe the game is good I was like ah don't careful don't rest on those Laurels lots of people think their games are good it's maybe it's still bad uh so I I need to um I'm letting that dissolve a little bit and it is heartwarming to know that people have not only like played and enjoyed the game and and it's received you know critical success and and that but also that the reason for that is that those feelings that I had and everybody in the team had of wow isn't it cool to feel like you're really exploring isn't it cool to think wow this was here the whole time uh isn't it cool to realize that there's another dimension and then another dimension to a game you know a world is is full of secrets in ways that you couldn't have imagined at the beginning isn't that neat that those feelings despite all these years have have managed to land for some people is it's a relief it's heartwarming it uh it makes me happy um Andrew it's been an absolute pleasure uh speaking to you about your game um it is beautiful to look at amazing to play and when we played it at a small Festival um in in Melbourne so many years ago it stuck in our minds uh so to have the chat to the chance to speak to you is a real pleasure so thank you so much for joining us oh this was so much fun thank you so much um you can find out more about the game by going to tunit game.com or you can follow follow Andrew on Twitter which is @ dicey um sifa is produced by Nicholas Kennedy Fiona Bola Mayas thank you for joining me Fiona thank you Daniel Ang Adam Christo Mitch low is our senior producer and my name is johanny djani and I'm the executive producer thanks to Omni studio for their support of sifter 3 podcasts you can find links to everything we've talked about on our website which is sia.com au read more about the games and the guests that we've featured and why not join the sifter Community if you enjoyed this you can share your creativity with others in our very chill server filled with awesome people you can visit cpa.com Discord to get there that again is ca.com Discord uh please share this show uh it is the number one free thing you can do to help support us word of mouth is really important to Indie podcasts like this so let your friends know if you reckon they'll enjoy it just send them a link maybe it will make it easier for them to get take part in the show and we'll love you forever for it that's all for now thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you uh on the next episode of the light map until then have [Music] fun

Channel: SIFTER

Views: 28,558

Keywords: tunic, game, finji, exploration, Puzzle, Souls-like, Difficult, RPG, andrew, shouldice, cute, fox, zelda, link, art, style, sound, language, indie, videogames, gaming, games, podcast, australia, aussie, gamedev, design, award, best, perth, western australia, pixel, sift, plays, development, souls, like, secrets, secret

Id: rfEJmV4usmU

Length: 31min 21sec (1881 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022