The Making Of…
SFB Games’ creepily cute pointand-click mystery Tangle Tower
Our interest in delving into the making of Tangle Tower stems largely from one thing: the sheer luxuriousness of it. From the sumptuously drawn backgrounds to its snappy script, detailed animation, vibrant designs, rich soundtrack and award-winning vocal performances, everything in this murder mystery visual novel is presented immaculately. How has indie outfit SFB Games achieved it? One look at the folder of sketches and notes we receive, full to bursting with flowcharts, scribbles and iteration upon iteration of character designs gives us our answer. They probably didn’t need to do all this, we suggest, although that is exactly what makes the game so striking. “Scope?” technical director Tom Vian grins at us. “What’s scope?”
Tangle Tower is far from a large game: all of the action takes place within the single, titular building, and although you’re free to explore the place and talk to suspects at your leisure, the story is a linear affair wrapped up in just five or six hours. But the attention to detail is lavishly applied, with all dialogue fully voiced, and each character responding with their own unique thoughts when presented with evidence – feats even beyond the reach of the Ace Attorney games. The secret was not as dramatic as mortgaging houses or surviving on cheap cuts of meat (the most precarious the food situation ever got, art director Catherine Unger jokes, was that “some days we couldn’t decide what to have for lunch”). Instead, it was a focused concept, and a brilliant custom pipeline through which everything flowed, that fuelled this small team’s desire to live up to one anothers’ standards.
The game’s lead, Grimoire himself, had been kicking about for a while already: SFB Games released Flash-based point-and-click murder mystery game Detective Grimoire: Secret Of The Swamp back in 2014. “That one has, like, a slight cliffhanger ending,” creative director Adam Vian says. ”I don’t think we were immediately planning on making a sequel – I just liked the idea of coming back to it. It’s more fun to write mythology when you’ve got a sense of some bigger secrets going on in the background. So we had this strange potential world to dive into.”
On a practical level, however, the biggest catalyst was the studio’s discovery of Creative Europe’s funding programme, which they entered in January of 2015. “But here’s the catch, if there is one – they only fund narrative games,” Tom smiles. “Their structure seems fairly copied across from the film funding structure from the same programme – so it talks a lot about characters, locations and the plot in terms of, you know, things you have to prove are significantly European. All the language around it was narrative. So we thought, if we were to submit something, what would that be? We had this vague idea that we’d like to make another Detective Grimoire game. And it just it felt natural to say, ‘Okay, well, this could be that.’”
Especially as the game that would become Tangle Tower was already very much rattling aroud in the team’s heads. “I remember Adam working on Tangle Tower before the funding,” Unger says. “It wouldn’t be called Tangle Tower for a long time,” Adam says, “but I had been slowly trying to write something.” Originally, as he fleshed out the idea of the Fellow family, the project was called The Fellows Of Fellows Hall – ”which sounds really twee, now,” he laughs. “But I just love writing character ideas, and so I would just do that for fun, not really knowing if it was going to turn into a real project or not.”
But here was an opportunity to pick up those loose threads from Secret Of The Swamp and make something productive from them for the good of the studio. And so Adam began to do so in earnest. “The decision I made which ended up defining everything about the game was that I wanted to fix the biggest flaw of the previous game,” he tells us – the fact that none of the suspects knew one another. “Even though they lived and worked near each other, they had nothing to say about each other, they hadn’t even
heard of each other.” And so the neat solution was to have all of the game’s characters be kin. Anyone who’s played Tangle Tower will recall the gigantic family tree tapestry hanging in the main hall, which gives players an overview of who’s related to whom – with two families featured, the Fellows and the Pointers. “We’ll connect that family tree to one or two of the characters from last time, just for fun. From there, it was: ‘Okay, so if it’s a family, they’re in their house. So where do they live? What kind of weird house is it?’ Because I really love creepy domestic settings – like, the ‘resident’ part of Resident Evil is the scariest, to me.”
We study the design documents. Adam’s notes insist that the house should have some kind of unique geographical quality: being on top of an improbably high mountain, a boat, a bridge, a cliff – or an island, which is where it eventually ended up. It also states that the design should tie into the reveal of a secret section of the house. “We knew that we wanted the tower to be quite iconic,” Unger says. “So I was sketching out the silhouette of this quite early on, it was one of the first couple of jobs I did.” The unusual nature of the murder that Adam had in mind helped guide her designs: the lead suspect of the last game being a mythological creature that doesn’t exist had worked quite well as a concept, and so he was keen to weave a narrative riddle in the same vein. The setup – that a painting of a knifewielding suspect, the depiction tipped with real blood, has stabbed its creator – was bizarre enough that Unger’s construction would need to accommodate it. “I think I drew a couple of characters, and a couple of mansion drawings,” she says, “before Snipperclips kicked off.”
As a break from their main project, Tom and Adam had taken part in a day-long game jam. Out of it came a prototype for a co-op game in which you played two pieces of paper cutting shapes out of each other to solve puzzles. SFB Games had never pitched to a publisher before and, recently furnished with the business card for Nintendo Of Europe’s head of secondparty
“I REALLY LOVE CREEPY DOMESTIC SETTINGS – LIKE, THE ‘RESIDENT’ PART OF RESIDENT EVIL IS THE SCARIEST, TO ME”
games, decided to give it a shot. “We had no idea that it would sit so perfectly with the thing that they had secretly in development at the time,” Tom says. They only found out what Nintendo’s ‘NX’ was the week after they asked Unger to join the company full-time. “That was wild,” she says, and Tom laughs: “‘You’re on the project! Also…’” What of their reaction to finding out about Switch? “Everything made sense all of a sudden,” Tom says. Unger’s manifested more obviously: “I think I got a nosebleed.”
Naturally, the Tangle Tower project was put on hold during the development of the Switch launch game. This played havoc with the timeline they’d set out for the funding programme, but eventually they were able to return. “The first few weeks, or months, of full-on Tangle Tower development were just me and Catherine sitting in the office talking to each other all day, every day,” Adam says. They’d discuss what clues there’d be and in which locations, which characters were telling the truth and which were lying, which new story elements needed to be added to spice up certain elements. “I remember taking a lot of stuff out as well during those conversations,” Unger says. “We killed a lot of babies – sorry, not literally.” Adam laughs, then tells us about the first way they tried to justify an entire house thinking a painting had murdered a Fellow: a puzzle with a perspective trick that “explained in a kind of Scooby-Doo way” how a photograph clue showed an entity reaching out of the painting with a knife. “It was the kind of thing that seems good on day one,” he says, “and then every day that passes you think, ‘This is really, actually quite stupid.’” The alternative explanation, which you slowly piece together as Detective Grimoire and his sidekick Sally in the final game, was built specifically around the architecture of the mansion and its twin peaks – and is much more evocative of these two families, and the two sides of the house, either unintentionally or intentionally miscommunicating with each other.
With the main framework in place, the layout of the house itself (presented during overworld exploration and witness statements via a neat grid of rooms and chibi-style character tokens, mainly designed for ease of use because SFB Games planned for it to be a mobile game even before Apple Arcade came calling) fell into place more naturally around the events of the crime – who should logically be where in order to provoke suspicion or provide alibis. And certain characters’ personalities or relationships led to particular parts of the mansion being added and playing into the mystery, such as Fitz Fellow and Poppy Pointer’s secret garden – which joins the two sides of the house at the top when unlocked via puzzles on each side, and hides a crucial clue.
With all the wild red strings pinned between each element of the mystery, it then became a matter of building the corkboard upon which all of it sat. “The first game was built in Flash,” Tom tells us. “And at the point of getting the EU funding, we had every intention of making the next game in Flash.” But having just made Snipperclips entirely in Unity, the two brothers found they had become accustomed to the other engine. “It helped us work together a lot better,” Tom says. “So I had to start again, basically. I had this structure of how to build a detective point-and-click engine because I’d done it already, but I did have to write it from scratch.” At the same time, Unger and the other Vian would continue to flesh out characters and locations. “At some point, we were able to start adding in a location that connected to another, and that location had a character in it that you could talk to, and, okay, now I’ve got to build a dialogue system. I go away and do that for a month, or whatever. But it naturally fit, I think, where when my engine was ready for Adam to start using was a great time to start coalescing the cloud of ideas into something more concrete.”
The game being playable, even in the most basic form, quickly helped to refine the script. “I was writing it in Word, as you do,” Adam says. “And then Tom’s engine formed, and he built these dialogue tools, which are really good inside Unity. And you were able to plug in dialogue and have the characters – just a single PNG bobbing up and down, no animation, no voice acting, but the text would scroll.” He soon abandoned Word and wrote straight into the engine. “I was able to play conversations immediately after writing them to see how they flow – ’Okay, this is too long, this joke isn’t going to work’, or whatever.”
Nevertheless, Flash was still the tool both he and animator Jonathan Harris would be most familiar with when bringing to life characters and conversations. And so Tom puzzled together a method of importing such things into Unity. His system would take Flash animations, then export them as a set of image parts and animation data, which Unity would piece back together and reanimate. “So we were able to do almost, like, model animation in Flash, where Jonathan would
animate each pose – and within that, there would be sort of nested frames, nested timelines for different facial expressions, the different heads.”
Once in Unity, Adam would be able to stick the raw data and images together with his dialogue. “He’d lay it out on a timeline where he could control how fast the text would reveal, exactly what facial expression was being pulled at any given time, what frame of animation Jonathan had made was being played.” In the same way as 3D animators sequence and blend together pre-baked animations in-engine, the SFB Games system knitted together its 2D visuals. “It allowed us to get the best of both, where Jonathan could animate by hand with a Wacom tablet in Flash, and Adam could use that base section of animation in Unity for… well, in the end it was, like, 3,000 conversations or something.” The iteration process became incredibly fast and flexible, Adam says. “I was timelining Penny [Pointer], and I found myself lacking a pose that just didn’t exist. So I’d say, ‘Jonathan, we need a pose with Penny waving her arms around like this, because I need it for these four or five lines.’ It was great to be able to go back and forth on that.”
It was these sorts of clever practical solutions, implemented early on, that would lead to the rest of the team having the time to cram Tangle Tower full of quality art. “It’s all about allowing everyone to do their job as much as possible,” Adam says, and Tom adds: “Yeah, just removing friction was my main job for a couple of months. I was like, ‘Okay, could we do this one per cent faster? Because we’re doing it a thousand times.’” After the main engine was built, for instance, he would go on to build a system that would randomly generate conversation animation from a set of sensible poses according to the dialogue fed into it. “It would estimate when and where the mouth flapping would start and stop, and lay out lengths of animation based on lengths of text or audio.” It proved suprisingly accurate for shorter lines of dialogue, such as when characters are presented with evidence, and ended up saving time that was reinvested into more bespoke moments.
Tangle Tower positively radiates attention to detail as a result, and it’s this – alongside the speedy collaboration of the SFB Games team – that elevates its relatively simple makeup to something of award-winning quality. But where does the desire to put in all that effort, to write dialogue and animate conversations that many players may not even bother to see, come from?
“What happens is, you get one really amazing element – let’s say Catherine’s background arts,” Adam says. “As the director, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘These deserve to have character art of a certain quality over the top of them. They deserve to have music of a certain quality playing behind them. And if they don’t, it would be a shame.’ So the bar starts getting raised.” He remembers wondering whether to hire an animator, knowing that he would have been able to animate to an acceptable level. “But we were in Budapest, listening to the music being recorded by an orchestra, which was a high point of the process in general. It was so incredibly beautiful and high
quality. And I thought, ‘There is no way you can ship this game without the animation being as good as the music.’” Unger nods: “It was creative escalation, wasn’t it? Every time something was added, we were like, ‘Oh, god, we need to make this better now’ – but in a really good way.”
Release, then, was nervewracking. “I think this is a narrative project thing, but we weren’t sure if it was good,” Unger laughs. Tom explains: “Because it wasn’t a script Adam had written upfront, and it was forming as part of the production process, we could never really test it on anyone until we had a fully playable game, which happened very late.” Adam adds: “With a mystery game, they can’t get the whole story unless they play the whole story – and once you’ve tested the mystery on somebody, that’s it – you can’t test it on them again!” Which led to a surprising post-release moment at AdventureX after Tangle Tower’s release via Apple Arcade in the autumn of 2019, where they finally watched strangers play the game in person for the first time – and some fail to make it past the first screen. “They were trying to click to move Sally, like in Monkey Island,” Adam says, “and they were like, ‘Why isn’t she moving?’” It was fascinating, he says, to see experienced players’ preconceived notions trip them up unexpectedly. A patch soon followed to help make the process of opening the map less obscure, but it was an instructive post-launch moment for the team.
Indeed, if revealing too much of a mystery too early rather defeats the point, Tangle Tower now surely stands as an ideal test case from which to work for future instalments. “I think it would be very strange if we didn’t try to make another one,” Tom smiles; the custom tools he’s created over the past few years ought to get some use. Adam goes further: “We definitely have every intention of making a new one.” Adam will once again be writing – wrapping up yet more of those loose threads he so enjoys leaving – and composer Raphael Benjamin Meyer will return, this time with a different MO. “He was like, ‘Next time, let’s get a swing band’,” Tom says. “No idea of what the game would be, he just wanted a swing band.” We wonder if SFB Games might revisit that early idea of a murder mystery on a boat – a cruise ship would certainly suit such a soundtrack. “No comment,” Adam says, as they all laugh. “Let’s have that conversation again in eight months.” Some mysteries, it seems, are destined to take a little longer to solve than others.