Tunic is a game that oozes passion from every polygon.
A love-letter to oldschool exploration games, most notably the Legend of Zelda series, it
hearkens back to a bygone era of game design where the player is expected to fill in the
gaps for themselves, and where the game manual is essential to figuring out how to progress.
For a game with so much nostalgia, it’s not surprising that Tunic started life as
the creation of a single developer.
Andrew Shouldice quit his job at a comfortable game studio to pursue his passion project.
What happened next is what made Tunic so great, as Shouldice realised that he couldn’t do
things all by himself.
It was dangerous to go alone.
Shouldice worked as a programmer for Silverback games, primarily creating hidden object mobile
games.
While Silverback was a lovely employer who took care of him, he had a creative itch that
his day job simply wasn’t scratching.
Shouldice regularly entered Ludum Dare game jams, competing to create the best game he
could make over a weekend.
Eventually, he began to feel even more ambitious.
He said: “I started wondering what I could pull off
if I spent not just a feverish weekend on something, but some feverish months.
My friends started asking, ‘So when are you going to go indie?’”
In the face of this peer pressure – and his own enthusiasm, Shouldice quit his job
without really knowing what kind of game he even wanted to make.
The day after he finished his work, he opened up a new file in Unity and began to experiment.
It wasn’t long before his player character – an adorable tiny fox – and his game
world – an isometric, low poly environment – began to take shape.
Speaking of the game world, Shouldice said: “Anything that's isometric just gets me,
like, bloated diagrams, and isometric, turn-based RPG sort of things.
The rigidness of the vertical lines and the regularity of the grid I like to look at a
whole lot.”
The internet responded very well to his first few screenshots showing off the game – at
that time titled Secret Legend.
Shouldice was excited to continue work, but quickly realised that he needed help.
We were able to speak to several members of the Tunic team about how they came together.
Said Shouldice: “TUNIC (or Secret Legend, as it was called
at the time) was only a truly solo project for a short while.
I knew I’d need help with music and sound, and also quickly learned that I’d need support
on the business side of things as well.
So, from very nearly the very start, I had folks on board for the things I knew I couldn’t
do — and for the things I didn’t know I couldn’t do.
“The most profound change I felt as collaborators joined and became more involved was how reassuring
it was to have the game exist in the minds of others.
When the design was an amorphous cloud of ideas, it was very easy to second guess myself.
Having people be on the same page meant that conversations could happen, which helped turn
a mercurial idea soup into a more concrete plan.”
Recognising that Secret Legend needed an amazing soundscape, Shouldice brought on board Power
Up Audio and composer Terrence Lee, better known as Lifeformed, to create the game’s
music and sound design.
Lee was excited to work on the project.
He said: “When Andrew asked me to work on Tunic with
him in 2015, I was excited because I was familiar with his previous work on some game jam games.
Some of them had a dark and gritty moodiness – I remember being impressed that he made
something strongly thematic and creatively whole while under the constraints of a game
jam.
“I also liked seeing how these gritty games contrasted with the bright and crisp style
of Tunic.
It gave me the confidence that I’d be working with someone with both an excellent creative
vision and the ability to execute it, which is quite rare!
“Over the years, as the project grew in scope (or as we grew to understand the scope),
I collaborated with my wife, Janice, to take on the range and size of the soundtrack.
It started small, but over time, it grew into us both equally tackling the soundtrack.
After working on it for so long, your idea of what the game is evolves alongside the
process of creating it, so it was so re-energizing to have Janice’s fresh interpretation of
it.”
For her part, Janice didn’t feel entirely confident working on the project – she worried
that she wasn’t good enough to do justice to the game that the team was making.
Her impact on the game’s soundscape, though, made for something particularly beautiful.
She said: “I started out helping out in a kind of
unofficial way and that fed into those imposter syndrome feelings.
Over time, it was extremely liberating to contribute to TUNIC.
At first, I was learning and emulating Lifeformed’s sound and following his lead on ideas which
was an invaluable experience, but after a few tracks, he encouraged me to let my own
sound influence the direction of the music.
This made me listen more closely to how what was happening in the game made me feel personally.
“The unspoken narrative in TUNIC hit me in a very nostalgic way and I felt something
open up and the rest of the music flowed freely in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.
This was largely because TUNIC is filled with nostalgia for the games we grew up playing
and I feel like I got to offer up that part of me that was first inspired by game soundtracks.
“It was a real privilege to watch the TUNIC come together over the years.
I only saw bits and pieces (Lifeformed tried his best to give me context to the tracks
without spoilers), so when I finally played it at launch, I was completely blown away.”¬
The Tunic team continued to grow – Felix Kramer came on as a producer, and the game
was published by Finji, led by husband and wife team Adam and Rebekah Saltman.
Even with a producer and a sound team, the game still took many, many years to complete.
A large part of this was the challenge of finding the perfect design style that matched
what the team were hoping to create.
Said Shouldice: “Design is a complex, multi-faceted, multi-headed
hydra of a thing.
There is no right answer, in a sense.
Once you know how you want this to work, you just plug away at the keyboard until it does
what you want it to do.
I am not diminishing the complexities of programming, but with something like design, the question
is, what do you want this to do?”
“People will often say ‘I could have made that game in a tiny fraction of the time’,
and… well, yes.
You’ve already seen the end product.
And once you know that, it can be a fun challenge to implement.
But really, it’s second-guessing yourself, revisiting things, and changing stuff that
really will make something take a long time.
“So, the take-away for me, is that every game is its own little puzzle to make.
You need to relearn a bunch of things as you make it.
That’s what makes it a novel experience; that’s what makes it enjoyable for people
to play, because they haven’t seen it before.
“That’s a long answer, but really: it’s iteration.
Iteration and learning things along the way.”
Through multiple revisions and through plenty of experimentation, the team settled on a
game world that rewards exploration and that doesn’t necessarily give the player all
the information they need straight away.
Kramer said that their perspective was shaped by nostalgic experiences poring through game
manuals from rented games: “I used to spend time with friends playing
obtuse games that we rented because the box art was cool, trying to figure out manuals
before we could fully decipher what the game was about – all with missing pages and cryptic
notes from previous renters, it almost felt like we weren’t supposed to be doing it.”
To help communicate this feeling, Eric Billingsley was brought on as a level artist.
He said: “I had been following Tunic’s development
for a while, and when Andrew asked me to join the team at the start of 2020 I was instantly
on board.
I loved Tunic’s art style and had looked to it for inspiration previously, so getting
to expand on that style and on Tunic’s world was an exciting prospect.
“At the time I joined, the game world was pretty established already in terms of the
big picture, but many of the details weren’t there yet, and the different areas didn’t
yet have their individual character nailed down.
“Helping to shape that, and seeing the game world come to life over the next couple years
was a really great feeling.
When all of the visuals, sound, and music finally came together I knew we had made something
beautiful, and I’m thankful I got to work with such wonderful people on this project.”
The result of all of this hard work is a game that sparkles with creativity, that draws
players in with its mysteries and unspoken lore.
The moral of the story is that wonderful things can happened when we share with others.
While Tunic started as a solo passion project, developer Andrew Shouldice felt a tremendous
benefit to sharing his vision with a team.
The project benefitted from the perspectives and experience of many different artists and
creators.
Everybody’s contribution made a difference.
Janice Kwan may have felt some impostor syndrome while working on the game’s soundtrack,
but her unique talents helped to elevate Tunic and add greater depth.
We all have something wonderful to share with the world.
Just imagine the things that we can accomplish when we build together.