I let Paul Taylor from Mode 7 take over the post awhile ago when they were working on Frozen Synapse, which (and I'm sure he would hate this) I think of as a Roguelike, but for tactical combat. A lot has happened since then. The game has since been brought over to the Vita, and he's been transformed into a husband, a man now known as Paul Kilduff-Taylor. They also just released Frozen Endzone - excuse me, Frozen Cortex - which is a Tycho game, for better or worse. Probably worse for them. I've mentioned that the Indie cadre is completely obsessed with sport at the moment, specifically with its legibility and arcade immediacy, but what Mode 7 did instead was to make turn-based robo-rugby. They could have just made a sequel to the game everybody already liked, but nooooooo. So now they've made the wrong turn at virtually every juncture, and are almost certainly doomed. If they have McDonalds in the UK, they'll no doubt be very familiar with it soon - and not as customers, if you get my meaning. They'll be working there because they are completely out of money as a result of their bad choices. I let him post here again because I thought it would make a nice epitaph, but as you'll soon see, it's far, far too long.
The last time I checked in with you, we were shoving our simultaneous-turn-based strategy futuresports thing - née “Frozen Endzone”, now “Frozen Cortex” - from the precipice of Early Access and then straining to hear the odd clanking sounds it made on the way down to release.
Our last game, Frozen Synapse, was released in 2011, a time when just getting a game on Steam was a major achievement. Now, of the 4300-plus games on Steam, 2500 have been added in the last 18 months (stat from the superb @GriddleOctopus): it’s a different epoch.
Change is an important idea in games. During Frozen Cortex’s development, we’ve seen the behemothic rise of the survival genre, the indie console invasion, the roguelike explosion, a surreal bitter war of words and categories, and a toppling of the traditional media fortress...that’s hardly an exhaustive list.
This is why actually finishing something matters so much to us: although our impact on the turbulent tide of gaming as a whole will be small; at least we got a word in edgeways. Frozen Cortex is done now: it comes out today. That might mean nothing to you but it’s a deeply surreal statement for me.
I should tell you about the game. “Speedball-meets-Blood Bowl” is what you’d say to the proverbial man in his elevator; “Frozen Synapse-meets-Chaos League” is what you’d say to anyone who will really listen. You have a squad of robots on a randomly-generated playfield filled with obstacles: you have to get a shiny chrome ball from one end to the other. Your opponent is trying to stop you; just like Frozen Synapse, your moves play out at the same time. Our crass, clickbaity marketing tagline is “the future of turn-based strategy”, mostly because we thought that would annoy people but also because...we’re really trying to push things in a specific direction.
Our Lead Designer Ian Hardingham told me about the fact that in a traditional “men-with-guns” game, the result is the sum total of many one-on-one interactions. In a ball game, you’re focussed a lot more on what happens to a singular object: it’s purer, in a way. He elaborated:
“In my games, I want every single decision the player makes to be meaningful and clear. In a fighting game or a MOBA you need to understand the game before you can understand the decisions. I don't want that: I want someone who's never seen the game before to sit down with a friend who's playing it and say, ‘Hey, why don't you go over there?’ Really, I want my games to ask the player to make larger creative plans, and then to bring up a load of interesting "calls" to make during play.”
Ian is someone who thrives on real choices. Where other designers focus on either their own systems or a story they’re trying to convey, Ian’s looking at having the player actually do something cool. When he prototypes a game and he’s not happy, he’ll tell me that the decisions aren’t interesting enough yet.
It’s - in the parlance of the new internet youth - 5edgy7me, to bash AAA if you’re an indie. However, when I play many AAA’s these days my choices genuinely seem to be about either when to trigger an animation, or a subset of diluted shooty-brain reaction time stuff that Counter-Strike still does better. There are also games so narrow that the only real decision seems to be about when to start or stop playing.
That’s fine: gameplay isn’t always everything. I mean that with total sincerity: there’s a real valid space for a range of designs. However, in these games the experiential is being prized over the real. If our games are trying to say anything at all, it’s that considered actions are interesting. Players want to actually have an effect on something.
We felt that Blood Bowl and Speedball proved you could take the interesting design elements of a ball game, then stick that in an electronic context without too much fuss. That wasn’t the case and the “LOL SPORTSBALL” crowd got us down at first, as I mentioned in my previous post: it felt like people tearing up the manuscript of your novel because they didn’t like the font. However, we’re starting to convince people we haven’t just made Mecha-Madden.
NorthernLion, a fantastic YouTuber who manages to somehow buck the “meme and scream” trend with actual intelligence, yet also entertain a significant and committed viewership, tried the game early on in its life. His audience raised a collective question mark. A couple of weeks ago he returned to it and....people got it. They even started requesting more of the damn thing. After months of resigned dread that nobody would uncover half of the effort we’d sunk into it, we all felt buoyed by the realisation that we just had to show people. Seeing Ryan sort through player cards and make decisions about his team, talking through the implications of each move...that’s how we imagined someone playing the game. That’s what we hoped for. Maybe we’ll change perceptions: along with Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball, the other robot sports game that launches, bizarrely and serendipitously, on the same day as ours...we could be some kind of movement.
The real effort of game development is often trying to maintain all of the important commitments in your life: emotional, creative and practical. I got married; Ian became a father; our company changed size, shape and location; we all had a lot of stuff to deal with, just as I predicted when we started off. Our audience won’t see that stuff, but they will see the animation system where Ian and Martin invested a huge amount of effort, the incredible AI that Ian devised, Rich’s astonishing environments...That’s where all of that experience went; the cool thing about making a game is that once that’s in there, it never goes away.
Just one little thing that stands out to me: the dialogue system. Ian had the brilliant idea of tying this directly into the AI, rather than into gameplay cues: so your computer opponent will tell you what they’re thinking. If you have a genuine choice to make, the enemy might say, “I know you’re thinking about taking the points: that’s so like you.” This is a machine getting in your head and trash talking you: it was horrific to write for, as the number of responses ranges into the thousands for every character and many have extremely subtle differences in their triggers, but the effect is like nothing I’ve seen before.
That’s not a bullet-point: I’m just trying to convey what working on this was like. There would be some crazy target and then somehow, through an exhausting combination of system and grind, it would exist. I got to the end of my tether and had to call in help from two amazing friends, Tom and Alex, to feed the word-hungry beast. Working with two other writers was a completely new experience for me but I have to say I enjoyed it significantly more than just toiling away on my own. I don’t want to go back.
It’s things like that which make me proud of the game and just want people to experience it all so much. This is a new experience for me, as I hated Frozen Synapse by this point in its life cycle and I couldn’t even bring myself to open it up and play a game. It’s the game that made my mostly-non-gaming father into a committed beta tester; the game that brought back a long-lost friend; the game that people tell me they’ve been waiting for; the game that Ian and I made which reflected all the important times we had watching weird late-night US sports shows and talking nonsense.
It might not speak to everyone but we love it and we’d love you to try it. If we could go back and start again, we wouldn’t change a thing.
Frozen Cortex is out on Steam.
Paul Kilduff-Taylor is co-owner of Mode 7 and exists here.
