Tracing Threads: The Making Of Tunic

Tunic began with Andrew Shouldice having to make a tough decision: he could either stay in his job, or he could quit and work on his game full-time. Shouldice jumped in 2015 with his eyes closed. He initially hesitated when asked why. 

“Why indeed?” Shouldice answers after a beat with a chuckle and a dramatic tone that suggests Tunic’s development cycle was a long one. He can’t point to one incident that prompted him to make his decision. His decision to leave his job was not influenced solely by one event. His departure wasn’t without uncertainty.

“I remember thinking to myself; this might be a bad decision,” Shouldice says. “But I would rather make the bad decision now than always wonder what could have been, you know? It’s very silly, but I get it. This was what pushed me to the limit. It’s something I truly want. Maybe it’s a bad idea, but I have to know.”

Tunic is finally launched, seven years after its conception and four years ago on the E3 stage. This isometric, vibrant action game places you in the shoes of a sword-wielding, fox character fighting across a vast landscape of hidden paths, secret structures, merciless enemies and deadly enemies. Tunic’s unique art, combat and setting have earned it a growing fan base. But while it’s currently one of the highest-rated releases of the year, Tunic started as a small solo project.

It’s time to start the adventure

Free of his employment safety net, Shouldice sat down – coffee in hand – to work on a project that wasn’t even a fully formed concept. His only direction at this early point was to make a game “with lots of secrets” and a protagonist “going on an adventure.”

That moment was when the game’s now-familiar vulpine hero started to take shape. Despite the sword-wielding fox being one of Tunic’s most endearing elements, it exemplifies the project’s early uncertainty. According to the creator, the concept for the creature was born partly from his inability to model humans. And this wasn’t an outlier. Shouldice recalls that he had a difficult time with his inexperience early in development.

“This is the first large-scale, commercial 3D game that I’ve made,” says Shouldice. “And for a long time, I was the only person putting code into it. Even though I was a programmer, video games are full of interesting things. And the programming part wasn’t necessarily the trickiest sphere.”

Shouldice realized he needed some help and began looking for other creators to assist him in crafting his game.

Shouldice first sent an email to Terence Lee, who, along with his wife Janice Kwan, would later work on Tunic’s soundtrack. Though excited by the idea of the project, Lee was unsure if he’d be available to compose for the adventurous title due to other obligations. Later that year at 2015’s Game Developers Conference, Tunic’s lead developer managed to connect with Lee and Power Up Audio’s Kevin Regamey, who would go on to lead the design of Tunic’s sounds.

Regamey recognized Tunic’s potential after playing a very early version of the game. “I played this build for, like, 10 hours,” says Regamey. “It was crazy. [Power Up Audio] all played it as a team, and we’re like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’” The moment was even more remarkable for Regamey when he remembers Shouldice saying, “‘This probably won’t make it in the final game.’ And it’s true [that] nothing in that build’s in the final game.”

Luckily, not everything from the game’s humble beginnings was scrapped, including the concept for its surprisingly tranquil music. “I always liked that contrast in the game of it being really visually and aesthetically gentle and pleasing but also being difficult gameplay-wise,” says Lee. “So, when I made music for it, I intentionally tried to make it a bit more chill and relaxing. And I think a lot of people connected with that.” Both composer and audio designer emphasize how vital the soundscape is for Tunic, with Regamey saying, “The audio is almost like a character in that world… there are a lot of moments throughout the game where it is necessary and important for the audio to take the spotlight. The music and the sound are kind of one-to-one with all these other things, like the game design and the level design and the art.” 

The Stitching Tunic

The early ideas of adventure and secrets began to be fleshed out with new colleagues joining the fray. One concept that enthused Shouldice was “visually pleasing and beautiful” isn’t inherently “on the opposite end of the spectrum of difficulty.”

“I think there are places for games, like some early Zelda games,” says Shouldice, referencing a prominent inspiration for Tunic, “[that] are beautiful and colorful, but still have that amount of difficulty and challenge that encourages you to be brave and to go to places that maybe you’re not ready for.”

Here, Shouldice’s idea of a game with adventure becomes apparent. Shouldice wanted to make a game where characters can go out and fight enemies or open treasure chests. He also wanted to encourage the adventure-seeking players to do the same.

“One of the most exciting moments for me when playing a game,” says Shouldice, “is seeing something scary and having that thrill of ‘I need to run away, or I need to deal with this.’” This idea is not just limited to combat. Tunic’s developer suggests that stumbling on seemingly impossible challenges or treading on ground that feels off-limits while exploring is a vital part of the games he admires. In Tunic, Shouldice says he wants players to experience the rush of thinking, “Maybe you’re in a place where you’re not supposed to be right now, you know? Maybe you’re really exploring in uncharted waters now.”

Tunic also had a lot to do with nostalgia. It’s clear the game takes many visual and design cues from NES, SNES, and Game Boy-era Zelda entries, but there’s more to it than that. The team talks about trying to recreate the feeling of finding unexpected lore in a game’s instruction booklet or putting your head together with friends to figure out the answer to a challenging puzzle – something that has become less common when players can simply look up a guide online. One of the easiest places to see Tunic’s retro design aspirations is in the in-game illustrated guides scattered throughout the world.

“The pages that you pick up are more than just a collectible. It’s not just you know, ‘I got all the manual pages. Hurray for me,’” explains Shouldice. “But maybe you’ve had this experience of flipping through a manual for some game and having that be an extension of the game experience itself. So, it’s not just, ‘Yeah, I know how to wall kick.’ The game tells you all about that. There are sometimes secrets. You can’t find the answers to certain questions unless you read through old manuals. Tunic is one such example. There are plenty of things that you will have to pore through these pages to figure out.”

Last Puzzle Pieces

With the core game coming together, producer Felix Kramer joined the crew and, in 2017, publisher Finji – which previously worked on Chicory: A Colorful Tale and Night in the Woods – started working on ways to spotlight the project. A year later, Tunic took center stage at Xbox’s E3 showcase.

“Having the trailer appear there was a treasured memory for me,” says Shouldice. “I don’t know if it’s a warm, fuzzy memory because I lost a lot of heartbeats that day. But that will definitely stick with me.”

The team worked on Tunic for three year, but 2018 marked the beginning of many new fans. They began to follow its development closely. These new fans also included game designers who were inspired by the game and started to use some of its ideas. “Every now and again, people will say that they’re drawing inspiration from [Tunic],” says Shouldice. “And given that this game so deeply draws its inspiration from other things, it’s pretty special to hear that other people can see it and, you know, feel that same feeling and want to make stuff themselves.”

Eric Billingsley was one of them. He started Tunic in 2020 as a level design. “Previous to that, I was working on my own solo thing, Spring Falls, and Tunic was one of the visual references I was using. It was thrilling to finally get on board. [Tunic],” says Billingsley. “At that point, the game was pretty much solidified in most of the areas, but a lot of the areas still didn’t look final yet. So, my job was to go in and bring those areas – make them look nice, like the stuff that had already been seen in the game.”

Difficulties that are in Development

Having admired the game from the sidelines, Tunic’s newest member may have been excited to get started, but he was also realistic. He was entering the middle of a long-running and difficult development process. Billingsley can recall his passion and his struggles in this role.

“One of the biggest challenges I found is, because the game is so stylized, sometimes it’s hard to tell when things look finished or not,” says Billingsley. “If you go too detailed, it doesn’t look like Tunic anymore, and if it’s not detailed enough, it doesn’t look like a finished thing. And keeping track of how everything is connected is even sometimes a challenge when it comes to level design.”

But many problematic aspects of Tunic’s design also feed the game’s strengths. Tunic’s isometric perspective, for example, initially felt limiting to several team members. Billingsley acknowledges the view could be restrictive, but “the hidden benefit of that is now it’s very easy to hide little secret paths.” Conveniently, this plays right into Shouldice’s vision of a game stuffed with secrets that prompt engaged exploration.

Power Up Audio’s Kevin Regamey also weighed in on the isometric perspective, saying it could “result in you hearing things that you can’t even see because [the sound’s source is] beneath the pane of the camera view.” But, mirroring level design, this constraint turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “As it stands now, there’s basically no 3D audio in the game, in the traditional sense,” says Regamey. “Everything’s playing back in 2D; it’s just like playing sounds. And it feels a little more one-to-one with how things were done back in the day.” Again, that unexpected result reinforces Tunic’s direction, this time emphasizing its old-school sensibilities. 

The speed of time

To prepare Tunic for 2022, the team was working hard over several years. During that time, Tunic’s lead developer was aware that some fans had been waiting half a decade or more to get their hands on the game and blames himself for the long wait.

“I’m the person that’s responsible for the development time, I think,” says Shouldice. “There was content creation and level design and learning how to make good animations and all those sorts of things. I think it’s probably safe to say – maybe the others could correct me – there’s no part of this game that has not been revised at least once or twice. The model of the key you find early in the game may be the original. But a lot of other things are second-generation assets that have been rebuilt as I’ve learned more about what this game is.”

Although he admitted that it took them longer than expected, his fellow teammates highlighted other reasons why the project was delayed. Terence Lee, the composer, talks about how no one knew the end result of the project in its inception. This led to ever-changing work. Additionally, the game’s audio and level designers emphasize some time-consuming, but necessary changes demanded a sizable chunk of the developers’ time.

“It’s a small, small team,” asserts Billingsley. “There was no way to do this project very, very quickly.” Especially since, according to Billingsley, the original size of the game was “twice as big, but it was mostly empty space.” Regamey, though hesitant to talk about cut parts of the game for fear of disappointing fans, did go on to reveal one section of Tunic that eventually got the ax.

“There once was a desert in Tunic,” Regamey explains. “There is no longer a desert because running across dunes was decidedly not as interesting as the other parts of the game.”

The Last Stretch

The team finally saw the finish line after revealing Tunic’s March 16 release date at The Game Awards in December. The announcement was a big achievement for the Tunic crew, as their trailer opened the massive show – which scored a record-breaking 85 million livestream views that year. When the finish line was in sight, it was hard for many of Tunic’s creators to decide whether they were relieved or nervous that the journey was almost over.

Looking over the experience, Shouldice shares his wish that Tunic “managed to capture that sort of childlike wonder” the games in his youth inspired. “And whether or not people get that feeling from the finished game, I don’t know,” says Shouldice. “I hope so.”