The Making Of...
How Mode 7 returned to the title that put it on the map, and decided that bigger was better
How Mode 7 returned to the title that put it on the map, and went bigger with Frozen Synapse 2
Seven years is a very long time in videogames. When we ask Mode 7 Games co-founder Paul Kilduff-Taylor about how the indie game development landscape of 2011 (when the Oxford-based studio found success with the first Frozen
Synapse) compares to 2018 (when the game finally received a sequel) he gets right to the point: “To some extent, it’s unrecognisable.”
A lot of the differences have to do with distribution strategy. There’s no longer any need to worry whether Valve will pick your game for inclusion on Steam, and courting streamers and social media influencers is just as important as the traditional press. But Kilduff-Taylor identifies one deeper shift that actually affected the way
Frozen Synapse 2 was designed. “You’re trying to think about retaining players for a very long time,” he says. “That’s one of the only ways you can gain traction with a strategy title now.” This trend, at least, actually suited Mode 7 pretty well. After all, scope and ambition are key to the titles that inspired Kilduff-Taylor and fellow co-founder Ian Hardingham to start making games in the first place.
“I’ve always wanted to play a game that feels bottomless,” says Hardingham, designer and lead programmer on Frozen Synapse 2. “Games that have more features than they can really fit inside their box – that’s something that’s always been very romantic for me.” So naturally, the sequel aimed for something much bigger. As for what exactly that would be – Hardingham admits that when the first game came out, “I had no idea what I would put in a sequel” – Mode 7, faced with a very modern set of challenges, found its answer by looking backwards, to two games from the late 1990s.
“The top-level design of the game was ‘ X-COM: Apocalypse meets Alpha Centauri’, with the Frozen Synapse combat,” Hardingham says. That meant taking the turn-based battles of the original game and housing them within a procedurally generated living city, where various AI factions pursue their own agendas. “We’ve got this amazing combat – now, can we make that the combat layer of a big strategy game?” The pair agree that having this tried-and-tested core in place was a vital foundation for the larger game they wanted to build. “We were starting with something people understand and know,” Kilduff-Taylor says. “Tactical combat, units with recognisable weapons, in a top-down
view – that’s something that a lot of players can immediately grasp.”
This was a lesson the studio had learned with Frozen Cortex, the game it made in the time between the two Synapses. Cortex used a similar aesthetic and turn-based strategy approach, but applied to it to a sci-fi sport rather than military combat. It didn’t make the same impact as Frozen Synapse, one of the reasons Mode 7 returned to more familiar waters with the sequel – “We thought it was time to be a little more conservative in terms of IP,” Hardingham says. Kilduff-Taylor believes misconceptions about Frozen Cortex being a game for sports fans might have put off some players. “For better or worse, combat is the grammar that a lot people who play games immediately understand and gravitate towards”.
Balls were traded back in for guns, and Mode 7 channelled its experimentation in other directions. Specifically, the melding of tight tactical combat with a more freeform grand strategy game – and making these two layers fit together proved a challenge for Frozen Synapse
2. The idea was that each tactical mission would zoom into the city map, taking place in levels lifted straight out of the larger topography. The technical challenge was quickly met, but that left another, rather important problem: the resulting levels weren’t much fun to play. A lot of missions required approaching a building from the outside, across large areas that might be devoid of scenery or threats. “You were getting levels where you’d played eight to ten turns before you had to make a real decision,” Kilduff-Taylor says. “That caused a mild existential crisis at the time, and a clash of values between ‘this is literally what the level is’ versus ‘the game needs to be fun for a human’.”
The team landed on a number of solutions. The strict five-second limit on turn length could be switched off by the player, so that each turn stretched out as long as units needed to complete the plans you’d laid out for them. How those units were initially deployed by the game was also varied, sometimes dropped right next to or even inside the building, and encounters were occasionally added on the way to a building. Meanwhile, to help players mentally process the larger levels that resulted from this approach – the expectation that players could plan every move, Kilduff-Taylor says, became an annoying effort at this scale – a ‘fog of war’ was added, concealing areas of the map until they were unlocked. It was a solution that, Hardingham says, “came out of me bashing my head for a long time against this issue of the game not being fun”.
Not everything fitted together perfectly, he admits: “The one systemic issue I never managed to get past, and I’m not sure it was possible to get past, was that Frozen Synapse’s core combat didn’t allow us to have as much variety of missions as I would’ve liked. It’s a game based around very quick, very tight combat and that is incredibly important to retain. If you have a game that allows you to have 45-minute missions with a lot of exploration, that allows you to have a much broader palette.”
Changing the way Frozen Synapse’s combat worked would have meant sacrificing the solid foundations its entire city layer was built on. Hardingham accepted it as an inevitability, and moved onto developing the encompassing strategy game. At this level, the main challenge was communicating to the player everything that was happening. The activities of the player and the AI factions all play out in realtime, and trying to keep track of it all can be dizzying. “One problem we had for a really long time was
“COMBAT IS THE GRAMMAR A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO PLAY GAMES IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTAND”
you couldn’t really tell how powerful the factions were, relative to each other,” says Kilduff-Taylor. “There was some kind of idea that the frequency of their activity would do it, but frequency is a really hard thing for a human to measure intuitively when there’s a lot of data. We hit on this idea called ‘shape control’ in the game, where the factions expand their territory as they get more powerful. And we also introduced some basic infographics into the game. If you go into the factions tab, you can see how they’re doing, and a broad power rating.”
There was also the question of how this virtual cityscape would actually look. The first game had established a clear visual style, its scenery and soldiers picked out in sharp neons against a black background, like Tron crashing into Enter The Void. But how would that translate to an entire metropolis? “The city wasn’t just ambitious in scale,” says lead artist Richard
Whitelock. “We also wanted to tread a fuzzy line between boardgame-like perfect abstraction, with obvious places and tokens on one side, and on the other a Dwarf-Fortress- like scale that was initially hard to grasp. We vacillated pretty wildly around this line as we figured out how the city would look and function.”
Whitelock worked on the original game, and was lead artist on Frozen Cortex – experiences which taught him the value of stripping everything back: “The primary thing we learned from Cortex was to not set the bar quite so high for the visual fidelity of Synapse 2.” Cortex had fully textured scenes and models with extensive animation; creating these was a huge undertaking for a tiny team. “In retrospect it was wise to play to Frozen
Synapse 2’ s conceptual strengths and always lean towards minimalism and abstraction,” Whitelock says. “This is a lesson that kept coming back throughout development – especially when we tried to add extra details or unnecessary layers.”
The same couldn’t necessarily be said of the game design. Hardingham and Kilduff-Taylor had chosen to embrace maximalism, and if lack of clarity was a side-effect of that approach – well, perhaps it was more feature than bug. “I always have this really ridiculous desire to confuse the player, because I’d like them to feel they’re in an endless sandbox,” says Hardingham. “Ian has a very interesting way of conceiving of information in games,” adds Kilduff-Taylor. “He really likes ambiguity, and the ominous feeling of an out-ofcontrol undefined system that you’re interacting with. And that’s part of the magic of games, particularly the kind that inspire us, like the older DOS-era games, which had this portentous feeling of going into an unknown world.”
Still, given part of Frozen Synapse 2’ s conception was an attempt by Mode 7 to be more commercially conscious, the pair realised that confusing players might not be the best idea. It might have been an appealing part of the games that inspired them, but a 2018 audience wasn’t necessarily ready to be as patient. “It’s a nice idea to get the player lost in your systems but so many players feel almost insecure if they’re not optimising constantly and don’t know what they’re doing,” says Hardingham. “And it’s actually kind of sad, because what I want you to do is be able to come into our game and just fuck around, for that to be rewarding and fun – but too many players want to know exactly what they should be doing at all times.”
“Player insecurity is a really big deal when you make a harder or weirder game,” KilduffTaylor adds. “The discussion around that is really poor – a lot of it leans towards the ‘git gud’ attitude. Either a game has to be so brutally hard that anything you do will kill you and if you don’t like that you’re an idiot, or else ‘I have to understand literally every stat in the game at all times and why aren’t you telling me, the developers are lying’. Finding the middle ground here is something you have to do intuitively, and it’s really hard to get feedback on that because it ties directly into someone’s personality.”
Getting the right balance was a theme of Frozen Synapse’s development. As KilduffTaylor explains, it led to tweaks of the game’s design: the relics system, originally the basis of the entire strategy game, was “something we fastened on very early, did a lot of work towards, then kind of abandoned, then came back to again.” It ended up being a system they used much more sparingly. Efforts to go deeper on the simulation of how factions interacted with their environment were dropped because it “can result in a lot of stuff that isn’t fun or is annoying for the player”. Even the inclusion of a linear story was “bounced around an enormous amount”, as the team decided how much it should guide the player and how much their experience should be freeform.
As the game developed, the devs constantly found themselves seeking a balance between two opposing desires: between their ambition and the reality of being a two-man team, plus freelancers. Between absolute veracity of the simulation and something that bent the rules to be fun for players; between players craving more information and the game wanting to retain some ambiguity. Whatever else might have changed for indie developers over the years, this need to strike a balance has always been there, Kilduff-Taylor says. “You’re still trying to do something that’s original enough to stand out but not so much that it’s alienating and people can’t grab hold of it.”