The Making Of...
How Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun revived a dead genre – and a studio, too
Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Developer Mimimi Games Publisher Daedalic Entertainment Origin Germany Release 2016
When Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun released on December 6, 2016, it was the culmination not only of two years’ development, but also of a near-lifelong dream for one of its creators, and a project they’d begun joking about almost a decade earlier. It also happened to be the date of the German Game Developer Awards. The Mimimi team travelled from their native Munich to Cologne and that night, Shadow Tactics swept the board.
“We were nominated in lots of categories, and we won almost all of them – four or five trophies,” lead designer Moritz Wagner says. “All that, having this game launch, checking Steam and being number one in global topsellers, being able to drink for free… it was a perfect night.” At least, it was as long as they could ignore the fact that the studio might not make it into 2017. “People had in the back of their minds that basically everybody was terminated, except for a couple of us.”
Mimimi had blown through its financial reserves finishing this game and didn’t have another project lined up. So, while the rest of the team celebrated, studio founder and CEO Johannes Roth was working the room, trying desperately to find the next contract.
If it had all ended that night, it would have at least made for a neat bookend, given it all began with an award too. The team’s first project was DaWindci, an app they made at university – Munich’s Mediadesign Hochschule, a short walk from where the studio is now based – that won them the student prize at Apple’s 2012 Design Awards. “That was the first huge boost we got,” creative director Dominik Abé says. “And for that we already had to found a small company.” After setting up that company to release the app, Abé and his team spent the next few years doing contract work and gradually hiring up everyone from their university days, until eventually the time came for Mimimi to make its first full game – The Last Tinker: City Of Colors, a mascot platformer that resolutely failed to set the world alight.
“It wasn’t like we established Mimimi as the studio that can do super-successful 3D action platformers,” Abé says. “So it wasn’t like that was something we could really build on.” On the plus side, this opened up the possibility of a very different project, one Abé had wanted to try for years: a revival of the isometric stealth tactics genre typified by (and, in truth, consisting almost entirely of) Commandos and Desperados. “I have this strong childhood connection to those games,” Abé says. “Reviving the genre, that was something I dreamed of in university.”
His pitch to the rest of the team was simple: Commandos, with ninjas. The games Abé had loved had mined the Second World War and Wild West settings, so he wanted to transport their mechanics to feudal Japan. As for where the idea from this setting came from, Abé says the credit for that goes to Wagner: “At university, he was doing ninja rap videos.” Yes, really.
“There was this hype in Germany for online rap battles,” Wagner explains. “I was doing that, and I had a persona that was a ninja, basically.” So one day, while thinking about Commandos – as usual – Abé passed his friend in the hallway, and put the two together. “I thought, ‘Whoa, this game with a ninja setting? That would be the most awesome thing,’” he says. “I told Mo and we were like, ‘Haha, one day we’re gonna do that… yeah, never.’ But then it happened.”
Not everyone on the team had such a strong relationship with these games. Lead artist Bianca Dörr remembers the first time she heard about the project: “Dom came into the room and said, ‘We want to make a Commandos with ninjas! How does that sound?’ And we were like, ‘Okay, great… what is Commandos?’” Dörr had never played either series. And she’s far from alone in this. The genre had spluttered out in the early 2000s, and by this point was all but forgotten. “It was not very easy to get a publisher for the project, because everybody said: ‘This genre is dead, it’s kind of expensive to make and there must be a reason why nobody is making them any more,’” Abé says. “But we firmly believed in it.”
The studio considered doing the project as a small-budget mobile game, but eventually it convinced Daedalic to publish a full-blown version for PC and consoles. “That was because they knew us from before in the German industry. We were always talking to them and they really liked what we were doing,” Abé says. “Convincing somebody else would have been super-hard.”
Because they were approaching the genres as fans, Abé, Wagner and fellow designer Martin Hamberger already had some insight into what worked and what didn’t. “We understood what made the old Commandos games great,” Wagner says. “And then we made only that. We cut a lot of features that would be awesome, because we wanted to focus on getting that basic experience right.” These cuts included a mission editor and co-op multiplayer, features of the old games that Mimimi just didn’t have scope for.
They also took their opportunity to address their own grievances, from overly situational character classes to the kind of exploits that, for a hardcore fan, could make the game trivially easy – chief among them, the existence of guns. “In Commandos, you could always just take three characters, go round the corner and just shoot in the same spot until you clear the map,” Abé says. After a little deliberation, they took the Gordian approach. “We decided we weren’t going to try and fix gun gameplay,” Wagner says. “We’d cut it back to something that is very simple and easy, focus on the stealth, and ship it that way.”
There were new challenges too – primarily, taking a genre whose home turf had always been mouse and keyboard and making it work on a gamepad. For answers, the team looked to two other games. There was Diablo III, which had brought the action RPG to controllers a few years earlier – “That was the one game that convinced me maybe anything is possible,” Abé says. And then, of course, there was Commandos.
The second game in the series, Men Of Courage, had made its way to PS2. They
“WE CUT A LOT OF FEATURES… BECAUSE WE WANTED TO FOCUS ON GETTING THAT BASIC EXPERIENCE RIGHT”
played it, and it was incredibly clunky – “Doing an RTS on a console back then was black magic,” Wagner says – but it did have one great idea: direct character controls. While these games normally have you queuing up commands with the cursor, Wagner says, “If I can control the character directly, it just feels very immersive.” What was lost in precision, gamepad controls gained in feel.
The console editions of Shadow Tactics arrived six months after PC, but controls were considered throughout development, something Wagner says improved both versions. “It helped for the usability of the whole game, I think, that we had to make it work on a gamepad.” Abilities were dropped or reworked, and simplicity – not generally one of the genre’s strengths – became a watchword.
The project continued, with a public beta in May 2016 helping Mimimi gather data on what was and wasn’t working for players. Feedback was positive but, with development approaching the end of its projected 18 months, it became apparent that this wasn’t enough time. The game was done, in terms of all content being in place, but it wasn’t quite there. “We saw, every day we worked on it, it’s just getting better and better,” Abé says. Wagner chimes in with a quick summary of the to-do list: “Polishing; fixing bugs; working on the enemy setups to make them perfect, not just good.”
That idea of ‘perfect, not good’ was something that mattered to the team. Partly, this was practical. Because there’d been no game like it for the best part of a decade, Abé says. “We had no idea how this thing would work on the market.” A small difference in the game’s Metacritic score or Steam reviews could tip it over the edge, especially given that it would be fighting for attention with The Last Guardian, which came out the same day, and Final Fantasy XV, then a week old.
Besides, Mimimi didn’t want to waste this hardwon opportunity to revive a genre everyone thought was dead. “We knew this was going be the one chance we had to try this,” Abé says. “So you want to at least have the potential to succeed.” By putting out a game as good as they could make, the team would be safe in the knowledge that, even if it failed, they’d done everything in their power to bring it back.
Publisher Daedalic could fund an extra month of development, but that wasn’t enough to get Shadow Tactics to where Abé and the team wanted it to be. To do more, Mimimi would have to eat into its own finances. “Both us and Daedalic, we didn’t have much money on the side any
more,” Abé says. This decision could be the thing that killed the studio.
So it was put to the vote. “Do we want to keep working on this and burn our resources and make the best game we can and maybe go out of business, or do we want to ship it the way it is?” Wagner says. “And the team voted.” In the end, Mimimi funded an extra three months of development. This made it possible to release the game they wanted to make, but Abé and Wagner are eager not to glamorise it. “In hindsight, we were right with that decision – but still, we’re not proud of it,” Abé says. “That’s something we never want to do again, to take that much of a risk.”
When the game released, all the extra work paid off. The reviews, from press and Steam users, were great, and sales were beyond expectations – to date, on the most successful of the multiple stores and platforms it’s available on, Shadow Tactics has sold 1.3m units. “It was a big relief, because nobody knew if there was an audience for this kind of game any more,” Dörr recalls.
“The response was amazing, but on the other hand, it was the hardest phase in the company’s history,” Abé says. “We were really broke.” Mimimi was still committed to doing the console port, revenue from Shadow Tactics’ early sales would take a while to come through, and it didn’t have that all-important next project lined up. Which is how the team came to be at an awards night, drinking to their success, knowing it might be the end of the company they’d been building since their student days. The majority of staff had been given notice that, unless the studio signed a contract in the next month, they’d be unemployed.
It would be another two weeks, right before Christmas, before the good news came through. “I think it was on December 23 when Johannes sent out the WhatsApp messages with, ‘Okay,
I got the deal. We’re safe,’” Wagner says. That deal was with THQ Nordic to make Desperados III, continuing one of the dormant series that had inspired them in the first place.
THQ had picked up the Desperados rights, and Mimimi had pitched the idea of a sequel that summer – one of three potential projects the studio had its fingers crossed on – but it didn’t have a final answer. “They liked the pitch, it was just a matter of, ‘Is there a good business case to make this?’” Wagner says. It was clear the publisher was waiting to see how Shadow Tactics performed.
“It was not exactly their first IP to work on,” Abé admits. “And they knew we were going to finish a
game in the same genre, so why not wait for it to come out?” Shadow Tactics’ success was enough to convince THQ to greenlight Desperados, which enabled Mimimi to nix its termination notices.
Now, Desperados III has released, and seems to have been another success. Mimimi has its next project locked down, another stealth-tactics game codenamed ‘Süßkartoffel’ (German for sweet potato). And the genre itself seems to be sprouting anew, with a Commandos sequel coming from another German developer. “Our plan of ‘We can bring that genre back’,” Abé says, “it kind of worked out.” And in turn, it was one of the genre’s progenitors which saved the studio right back.