We immediately move from the topic of how this award-winning game was made to notebooks when sitting down with Andrew Shouldice, fresh off a double BAFTA win. Shouldice admires our little Moleskine affair, and it’s only after a good few minutes of discussing the relative benefits of stitched versus ringbound that we actually get to the point. Certainly an unexpected tangent, but one that points to Tunic’s important role in the development of such apparatus.
As we catch up with Shouldice, now back in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he shows us the notebook that contains the very first inklings of this game, dating back to 2010 – five years before Tunic’s development began. Players wouldn’t necessarily recognize its contents, he says: “It has notes for games that didn’t become Tunic. Things like ‘What if it was a pixel game where you’re just a seven-pixel guy?'”
In essence, this notebook is a manifesto, as Shouldice was trying to identify an itch that wasn’t being scratched by the games he was making at work. Getting away with something in videogames is one of his favorite feelings. If the moment-to-moment is really exciting, playing something where the story is already written and I’m just turning the crank or checking boxes can be fun, but I’d rather feel like I’m exploring.”
He noted down examples from other games where magic was summoned. Despite not being mentioned in the manual, Super Metroid’s wall jump is accessible right from the start to canny players; A Link To The Past’s Magic Cape, which Shouldice admits he “always forgets about, but it always seems separate.” When referring to this feeling, Shouldice sometimes used an asterisk. It might say something similar to the name of the project Shouldice quit his job to make: Secret Legend if translated into the game’s glyph language.
Shouldice faced a loop as the other Stugan projects bore fruit (that year’s crop included Tom Francis’ Heat Signature and Yono And The Celestial Elephants, both of which were released in 2017). In terms of development, it’s always a year away. As long as you work hard and apply yourself, a year seems like a lot of time to accomplish anything.”
As close as we can get to experiencing the game as Shouldice does. “There were so many old versions of this that got cut,” he says of the game’s levels. Does he regret that? “There was an area that was rebuilt so many times. It started as a desert, then a desert with cliffsides, then a dark forest, then a different dark forest. Then it was just removed. It’s supposed to go somewhere in the game – but it’s not there any more. I regret that area not being there. I don’t think it would have made the game any better; it’s just that a lot of time was put into it, and it would have been nice to see that effort realized somehow.”
Iterative development results in incredibly dense content in the game. I look at Tunic’s overworld, and every element of it was considered – and I’m not trying to sound like some galaxy-brain designer,” Shouldice says. I decided to zigzag through this area and open it up to shrink the world a little bit because it used to be open. The isometric perspective is used to tuck hidden paths into practically every corner, many available from the very beginning if only you’d seen them – and Tunic’s secrets are just the tip of the iceberg.
Ciphers and codes
It was Shouldice who mined ideas from his old notebooks, but it was his collaborators who contributed some secrets of their own as well. Cryptography enthusiast Regamey once made Phonopath, a Flash puzzle game that included only sound files, challenging players to use audio manipulation, music theory, and other skills to find passwords hidden inside. A sleepless night was spent cracking Tunic’s code after he clocked its language in a very early build. Shouldice was shown a screen filled with glyphs when Power Up delivered a 30-second sample video in 2015 to demonstrate its capabilities. A grin spreads across Regamey’s face as he recalls, “It said, in his cipher, ‘Sound treatment by Power Up Audio’ – and in the corner, ‘Cool game bro’.” It was the first time Regamey had deciphered his own cipher.
Shouldice credits Finji, the publisher who signed Tunic early in development, with patience. I remember [Finji director] Adam Saltsman coming to me at some point and saying, “Hey, I’m going to start asking you about scheduling time to think about deciding on a release date in a few months.” “Very gentle, very accommodating, very respectful of my fragile psyche.”
An overview of the manual
Shouldice learned to work “sloppy and fast”, knowing that he would have to rebuild anything he built. Scrapping “garbage” is less painful, he says – the trick is to keep it in the garbage phase for as long as possible. Everything was pulled together into a polished final product over the past few months. As a result, Shouldice estimated how long each task would take, and created a spreadsheet titled “Tunic Content Complete Before Andrew Turns 36”.
It is surprising that the manual was saved for last, given how important it is to the game. Its contents existed before then, but only as rough sketches, with just enough detail to allow playtesters to follow along. It made sense to keep things extremely rough since things were going to be in a state of flux, much like the geometry of the overworld. It was a “risky” choice, he admits, but it worked out – and he wishes he’d approached development that way from the start.
The advice I am giving myself after a seven-year project is to be sketchy when necessary. Because one of the main reasons the game took so long was trashing work that I spent too much time on, when I shouldn’t have. So, as his mind starts to turn to what’s coming next, will he apply that thinking to his next project?
However, as much as it would be good to keep that philosophy in mind when creating a new game, it is always a matter of reinventing the wheel at the end of the day. You want something new and fresh if you are going to play a game. Otherwise, you can just play the old one.
If Shouldice were to make “another game like Tunic, with action-adventure and fighting and a bunch of secrets,” he says, “most of the good ideas are in there.” Shouldice has emptied all his notebooks. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s headed yet. But it’s hard not to suspect that somewhere within those idea-filled pages, there’s an answer waiting to be discovered.
