As I delved into this fascinating interview with the creators of Adrenaline: Time for Assault, it reminded me of my own journey as a game developer. Like them, I too have spent countless hours tweaking mechanics, balancing difficulty, and striving to create something unique yet accessible.
In a fresh take on the Metal Slug series, Metal Slug Tactics breaks away from its predecessors’ side-scrolling shooter format. Instead, it offers a turn-based tactical roguelike experience that breathes new life into the usually slow-paced genre. The developers at Leikir Studio aimed to incorporate Metal Slug’s signature fast-paced side-scrolling action by focusing on the game’s movement system. Consequently, this tactics game stands out with unique characteristics and undeniably carries the Metal Slug vibe.
As a diehard fan, I can tell you that Metal Slug Tactics is an exhilarating game where every move matters! The combat system revolves around tile movement, with each character’s offensive and defensive prowess directly influenced by how far they advance during their turn. This seemingly minor twist has profound tactical consequences, as stationary characters find themselves at a significant disadvantage. The result? A refreshingly unique blend of run-and-gun action and turn-based strategy that demands entirely new strategies to master.
In a chat with Game Rant, Aurelién Loos, CEO of Leikir Studio, shared insights about their strategy for developing Metal Slug Tactics, combining aspects of it as a tactics game and its role in the Metal Slug series’ history. Loos also discussed the wide range of character builds in Metal Slug Tactics, its implementation of roguelike elements, and how the essence of the Metal Slug franchise influenced several of the game’s key features. For your convenience, this interview has been shortened and clarified.
Making Metal Slug Tactics Fit The Franchise
Question: Why did you decide to create a strategic version of the Metal Slug series, which is usually recognized for its side-scrolling shooter style?
After a prolonged desire to collaborate, our conversation with Dotemu finally took place. Previously, Dotemu had partnered with SNK, so everyone was keen on finding a mutually beneficial project. However, it wasn’t straightforward as many of SNK’s top games fall under the fighting genre, requiring a specialized studio to develop such titles.
Initially, given our deep affection for the classic game series, Metal Slug, with me having a particular fondness for Metal Slug 2, we pondered about how we could contribute something unique to this beloved franchise. While it’s possible to enjoy the original Metal Slug games even today, they remain fun and engaging, our team lacks expertise in run-and-gun game development. Consequently, it would have been overly ambitious to propose creating a new Metal Slug title, given our current skill set.
We pondered over it and proposed a concept that aligns better with our company culture, which favors tactical and strategic gameplay. When I presented this concept, my team responded positively and expressed interest in further discussions. Additionally, we suggested creating a visual prototype to illustrate our idea, given the popularity of Metal Slug‘s pixel art. To ensure we could translate that into an isometric perspective, we made a graphical mockup to send to SNK. This way, we had tangible evidence instead of just requesting to work with their IP. Demonstrating our enthusiasm and familiarity with Metal Slug‘s history was crucial for us.
Well, being a die-hard Metal Slug enthusiast myself, I knew it was crucial to capture the essence of this iconic series. To achieve that, we aimed to incorporate key elements such as:
A: For me, three big points guided the production of the game.
One approach could be to express it as follows: The initial concept is a battle scenario in which your team is significantly outmatched. There are just three of us, while our opponents appear numerous. To convey this aspect of toughness and strategy, we aimed to incorporate challenging tactical elements into the gameplay.
The second aspect we focused on is rhythm or flow, aiming to incorporate the fast-paced action and strategic positioning from the Metal Slug series into our tactical game.
And the last point is more on the art side. If you play the Metal Slug games, they’re still beautiful and incredible. The attention to detail is amazing; for example, every enemy has a unique death animation for each weapon in the game, making everything feel very lively. That’s something we wanted to bring into Metal Slug Tactics, but it takes a lot of time to achieve that, especially since we’re working with an isometric view.
A: When it comes to representing a two-dimensional franchise using an isometric view, did you encounter any issues during the process?
The main hurdle we faced was having a tiny workforce of merely six individuals on this project, making us a minuscule team. Yet, the game itself is enormous, not only because we’re ardent enthusiasts but also due to our tendency to keep expanding it with more features – an impulse born out of our passion. Essentially, the task at hand was finding what we could feasibly accomplish within our constraints of time and finances.
It proved to be both tough and entertaining as we delved into fresh perspectives, such as designing boss characters not commonly seen in games. For instance, we tackled Aeshi Nero from Metal Slug, a character whose shadow is all that’s shown, but we aimed to create a massive boss by envisioning the full body, its actions, and other details. And that was quite exhilarating.
A: In our discussion, you asked about my connection with the creators of the classic Metal Slug series. How would I describe it? Well, we had a collaborative working relationship where I sought their insights and advice on various aspects.
A: Our interaction with SNK wasn’t extensive at first, given that they own the intellectual property. Therefore, they had to verify everything we did. However, they showed faith in us from the beginning because we were well-prepared and demonstrated our reliability. The relationship we built was truly remarkable.
Since strategic games aren’t something they excel in, they couldn’t provide detailed comments on the gameplay. Instead, their interest was piqued, and they wanted to ensure our interpretation of the IP remained appropriate. Fortunately, everything progressed very well and was incredibly exciting.
During our trip to Osaka, we had an absolutely fantastic time! Toko-san is incredibly friendly and welcoming, making the experience all the more enjoyable. Everything was truly wonderful.
That must be really special as a fan of the series.
“Yes, it was amusing because at first, I was the fan, but then the tables turned, and my work became something they admired too. The appreciation we received was unexpectedly reciprocal, more harmonious than anticipated. Plus, they were incredibly kind, showering us with posters, autographs, and other thoughtful gestures.
As a gamer, I’m thrilled to be part of the Metal Slug Tactics universe. Being a spin-off from the classic Metal Slug series, it brings a familiar and beloved feel to the table. The franchise’s unique blend of action, humor, and fast-paced gameplay has definitely found its place in this tactics title.
In essence, one of the primary advantages of working within this universe is that it compels us to adopt a distinctly novel thought process. Instead of crafting an ordinary tactical RPG, we’ve designed Metal Slug Tactics with movement at its core. Constantly moving and making strategic decisions during each turn is crucial for evading attacks and building up adrenaline. Adrenaline, in turn, enables the use of powerful attacks and abilities. This approach sets it apart—it necessitates a unique way of thinking.
That experience was quite rewarding since we managed to produce something novel. It’s always exciting to invent something fresh, but what truly motivated us was the desire to incorporate the robust DNA of a fast-paced, or “run-and-gun,” game into a strategic one. I believe this is one of the key advantages. Additionally, from the perspective of the franchise fans, it’s fantastic news that we have another pixel art game in the Metal Slug series, and as a fan myself, it’s really thrilling to witness its return.
That’s a very interesting approach to expressing the series’ sidescroller gameplay tactically.
Frankly speaking, the task was incredibly tough since there were no precedents – no one has ever attempted something similar. We didn’t have any other games to draw inspiration from or lean on for assistance. Consequently, numerous revisions and trials were required.
Simultaneously, our aim was to empower your squad to tackle numerous foes effectively. To achieve this, we devised a synchronization system. If you strategically place your characters correctly, they can strike enemies unexpectedly. Essentially, the gameplay revolves significantly around movement and positioning, setting it apart from other tactical RPGs in terms of strategy and maneuverability.
As a gamer, I’ve found it crucial to strike a balance between the roguelike and arcade-like elements in our game design. The roguelike aspect serves as a nod to the raw, unforgiving nature of classic arcade games. In essence, the roguelike mechanics perfectly embody the spirit of arcade gaming, making it an excellent metaphor for these timeless experiences.
How Metal Slug Tactics Approaches Roguelike Progression
Q: Let’s talk about the roguelike side of the game. What was the team’s approach to Metal Slug Tactics’ roguelike progression?
B: Each playable character in our game has been meticulously crafted to offer a distinct experience. In total, you’ll find nine characters, all of whom have their own unique traits, stemming from the detailed exploration of their backstories and personalities. The gameplay and abilities for each character are tailored around these individual characteristics, which was our initial focus.
To provide a balanced gaming experience, we designed a unique battle system featuring distinct characters, granting players a sense of power simply by choosing these characters. However, it was crucial to ensure no character became overly powerful. Thus, our goal was to establish progression within each individual play session and across multiple game sessions.
A significant effort was put into striking a delicate equilibrium between moments when the gameplay offers extraordinary power, which is thrilling, but not so frequently that it becomes monotonous. Our focus was on creating an optimal blend of challenge and enjoyment throughout the game by carefully adjusting its settings.
A: It’s crucial to consider that aspect as well. How can we ensure both difficulty and rewarding experiences for the players? Are these “golden runs” intended to occur infrequently?
Occasionally, due to our flexible settings: Let me illustrate this with an example. You’ll find options to customize your weapon, and you’ll discover unique attacks capable of altering the game map or inflicting damage on your opponents. Moreover, there are passive abilities – these can be incredibly potent and significantly transform how you control your character.
Often, you’ll find yourself equipped with powerful tools, but what makes your journey extraordinary is mastering the art of combining them effectively. Essentially, it’s a continuous learning process where you uncover new skills and strengths, enabling you to conquer even the toughest challenges in the game’s advanced settings.
Q: Roguelikes are repetitive by nature. How does Metal Slug Tactics keep runs feeling fresh?
A: Your question is excellent! In this game, we offer multiple characters for players to select from at the start. Each character comes with unique abilities, weapons, and settings that set them apart. As a result, when you initiate a run, the experience changes based on your chosen team, individual character, and configuration. This diversity ensures an engaging and distinct gaming experience each time.
In the subsequent stages, as you progress through varying degrees of challenge, the game transforms into a significantly tougher version. Consequently, your gaming style adapts and evolves, ensuring that each level offers a unique experience, whether you’re playing on easy mode or hardcore mode.
The last point is every mission has some sub-objectives, and all these sub-objectives are semi-random, and they really change the way you go into a mission. You don’t play the mission the same way if you need, for example, to kill a very specific target or clear the stage before three or four turns, and stuff like that, so we really try to have a lot of different ways to refresh the way you choose to fight in a very specific map. We have a lot of layouts, and a lot of maps in the game, and not all the layouts are accessible from the start. The more you go into difficulty, the more layouts you unlock.
A: Are there various types of weapons and modifications available for them? Could you provide an illustration of how a specific weapon and modification pair might significantly alter your tactical thinking?
A: For example, if you use the grenade launcher system, it’s a very useful weapon because you can shoot on different levels in the map, and you can be very strategic with your teammates. You can shoot at different elevations in the game, and it’s the only weapon you can do that with. On the other side, for example, if you have a machine gun, all the projectiles of the machine gun are physical. What that means is, for example, you can shoot six or seven bullets, and if you kill a target with the first bullet, the other bullets will continue through and shoot another enemy behind the first one, and so on.
Here’s another example: A flamethrower functions as a more strategic tool in battle, enabling you to set traps for your adversaries. Each weapon has its unique characteristics, and by applying modifications, the way you utilize it can significantly alter. This could result in higher damage output, causing enemies to flee or move slower. Slowing down enemy movement is extremely beneficial and effective in combat. Some modifications might even alter the shape of the damage zone produced by your weapon.
A: Could you tell me about your strategy for creating adversaries and combat situations in Metal Slug Tactics? The franchise has presented players with some intriguing enemies throughout its history.
Designing the game was quite challenging as we aimed to create an engaging experience that aligns with the Metal Slug intellectual property. To achieve this, each enemy in the game serves as a puzzle piece, presenting problems for the player to tackle. It’s not simple to devise strategic challenges when designing a game centered around movement and positioning, but our enemies aim to provide such challenges effectively.
From another perspective, it was essential for us to include unique adversaries with distinct characteristics. For instance, one of the earliest peculiar, distinctive enemies introduced in our game was the mummy, as it is the initial enemy encountered in Metal Slug 2. The mummy has a power to transform the player into a mummy, which strips them of their powers. We aimed to strike a balance between adhering to the original IP and providing engaging challenges for the player that weren’t overly frustrating, while still being true to the IP.
Initially, while working on the mummy status, players would find themselves stripped of their skills, moving sluggishly, which turned out to be an unenjoyable experience. We realized this wasn’t fun at all, so we began brainstorming ways to improve the transformation. If a player turns into a mummy, it should have both disadvantages and advantages. Certainly, you lose your abilities, passive skills, and more, but in return, you acquire a formidable weapon to combat other mummies. Essentially, we focused on carefully considering the design aspects of enemies and finding a balance between their characteristics and gameplay.
Metal Slug Tactics’ Characters and Build Variety
Question: Regarding the characters in this series, they are quite renowned. Can you share your method for incorporating these well-known figures into gameplay while still keeping them true to their original personas?
Initially, I might express it as, “On one hand, it was truly enjoyable; on the other, it presented quite a challenge.” Each character underwent multiple, significant revisions, and their designs were altered significantly. For instance, initially, all characters shared the same abilities in the game’s beginning. However, we felt that this wasn’t satisfactory as each character lacked individuality or uniqueness due to the abundance of similar abilities available during play.
In our planning process, we decided that every character should possess unique abilities and stand out distinctly from one another. This meant creating diverse designs, animations, sound effects, and more. It was a significant shift in the production phase due to its complexity. However, it proved beneficial as it allowed us to make our iconic characters truly special and engaging, as we aim to do.
That was a big challenge: making each character special, while also finding very different ways to make them special. When we started to get really good designs, the rules of the game were set, everything was great, and the game was fun. Each character had a very specific build, and we were really happy with that. But then, since it’s a roguelike, each character needed to have two or three different builds. And that part was much more difficult—saying, “Okay, this character is very special, but we need to have three or four variations of this special.” That was the tricky part with the characters.
Question: Regarding these diverse approaches, could you explain how various playstyles manifest within the game? What factors might cause one player’s strategy for a level to deviate significantly from another’s?
Here’s one way of paraphrasing:
As a gamer, I’ve got to say, this game has an array of unique characters that offer diverse playstyles. Some characters focus heavily on manipulating the battlefield, moving us and our foes around, and so forth. The real magic happens when you assemble a trio of these characters. Experimenting with various team compositions is the highlight for me – it’s all about finding the perfect synergy. By the end of development, I estimate we clocked in anywhere from 200 to 300 hours playing the game, still discovering fresh character and power combinations to this day.
A: Given that the studio has had experience with games such as Rogue Lords, did your past projects influence the strategies you decided to use when working on Metal Slug Tactics?
As a gamer, I can definitely vouch for that! The roguelike aspect of Rogue Lords was a goldmine for us in terms of learning what kind of resources to provide players with. Striking the right balance between enough and not too much is crucial in any roguelike, and the insights we gained from this game were invaluable.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we weren’t able to create a comprehensive tutorial explaining the mechanic of our game, leading some players to find it difficult to grasp. While others appreciated the fun and balance, those who struggled found the mechanic challenging, as they felt that using it would result in losing health points. Consequently, for these players, the game became nearly impossible, as success seemed to require cheating or exploiting the system.
The lesson derived from the experience was valuable. Our timing for initiating the tutorial and budget constraints hindered its effectiveness, leading us to learn from this oversight in Metal Slug Tactics. In other words, we managed to create a novel concept with Metal Slug Tactics, but it seemed some seasoned tactical RPG players overlooked our innovative approach. They would bypass the tutorial, presuming they already knew how to play such games, and consequently played Metal Slug Tactics as if it were a traditional turn-based RPG. However, doing so was detrimental because their lack of movement resulted in quick defeat. Rogue Lord served as an essential guide for us to steer clear of repeating this mistake in the future.
A: In what manner did you develop the narrative for Metal Slug Tactics? What type of story were you aiming to create, and did you draw inspiration from previous installments in the series for guidance?
A: The cool thing about Metal Slug Tactics is that we are creating a tactical RPG, so we have a lot more space to tell a story. In the Metal Slug universe, every character has a story, a past, and so on, but as a fan or player, you never really get to access these backstories because, in the original games, there wasn’t enough space to tell those stories. In the main story of the game, we stay very true to Metal Slug—we don’t change too much—but what we do put on the table is the relationships between the characters, the interactions within the team. You can unlock a lot of little scenes that talk about their pasts, what they want to do in the future, and things like that.
One of the biggest achievements in the game is unlocking all the different narrative endings for each character. And it’s not easy, because you need to discover the secret endings of the game, and you need to unlock them with all the characters. When you do, you get a really cool story about what each of the iconic characters will become in the future. Everything was validated by SNK, so it’s canon.
Question: Moving on to the characters’ equipment, it offers various choices for each one. Could you tell us about your process in designing these loadouts? Did you aim to emphasize specific character types or archetypes?
In this game segment, we focused on giving each character a unique starting point, which we treated as distinct versions of their special skills. These skills can develop and be played in various ways, leading to different playstyles when selecting a loadout. For instance, choosing one loadout with a character may result in a distinctly different play experience compared to choosing, say, loadout 4 or 3. This is because the way you control each character will change based on your chosen loadout. This was the thinking behind the loadouts in this part of the game.
A: Can you remember if any major changes were made as a result of playtesting, based on the feedback received during that process?
After playtesting, we found that while there were some changes, the core mechanics remained largely unaltered due to focusing on simplification. We reached a limit in terms of strategy and tactics complexity, as the game was too challenging for players due to an overwhelming number of options. To make it more enjoyable, we primarily aimed to decrease the mental effort required from players by reducing the number of choices they had to make at each turn, from around 50 to approximately 10. This adjustment ensures that the game remains tactically rich even with fewer choices.
To enhance enjoyment in the game, one adjustment we made was streamlining the synchronization mechanic. In this game, when you assault an adversary, and another character is within range, they would automatically execute a bonus action and strike the same enemy. While straightforward, each character initially had unique methods to initiate synchronization, making it overly complex and resembling more of a puzzle than a game due to the specific conditions required for each character to trigger synchronization. This is a great example of one aspect we simplified in the game to make it more engaging.
Q: Was there any aspect of the game that was particularly challenging to get right?
B: The issue we previously tackled seemed particularly difficult: striking a balance between making the game strategically sound yet unique. We aimed to present something novel while simultaneously demanding quite a bit from players. Finding that equilibrium of creating a tactical and enjoyable experience, as well as a new concept for players to grasp, proved incredibly tough. It took numerous revisions to find the optimal solution. However, when we observed the game becoming more accessible during playtests and players diving deeper into it, we were genuinely thrilled. Witnessing players appreciating the demo and even completing it during Steam Fest was a fantastic experience.
Q: Do you have a personal favorite character or loadout you enjoy playing?
A: I think Marco is really insane because, when you start playing with him, you might think, “Okay, this character is a little basic,” but his power is really insane. You can get reactions really easily if you play him well, and he becomes a real leader on the battlefield. The sensation when you achieve that is really, really great.
Q: Any last thoughts you’d like to share?
A: Ultimately, our passion lies with Metal Slug, which is why we crafted this game specifically for fellow enthusiasts of the series. Every aspect of the project stems from that devotion. I’m confident that players will find enjoyment in the game, as it was designed with fans in mind and created by a team who shares that same passion.
[END]
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2024-11-14 20:25