Tunicis a deceptively challenging and adorable indie adventure starring a lovable fox hero, and it was a major hit when it was released last year. The game combines some of the most beloved elements of classics likeThe Legend of ZeldaandDark Soulswhile still retaining its own unique identity thanks to its charming visuals, breathtaking soundtrack, and intriguing instruction manual that grows as the player uncovers new game mechanics.
Game Rant recently spoke withTunic’s creator Andrew Shouldice about the game’s reception over the last year, his future plans, and his advice for other developers who may be considering taking the reins on their own projects.The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q:You obviously have to wear a lot of hats during development. What’s your favorite aspect of development to work on?
Shouldice:I guess, in general, my favorite domain to work within is like two seconds long. I know some people are really good at grand vision, they can see the beginning, middle, and end of something, and they work in the frame of hours. There are some people that are really good at writing prose and dialogue and stuff like that, and they work in the frame of minutes. I like individual tiny things that take like a second. That’s where I like to spend my time. A flickering candle flame, an attack animation, or a door opening. Those are the sorts of things that I have the most fun with.
Q:You left your job at Silverback to focus onTunic. Have you found that you prefer to take the reins on creative projects?
Shouldice:Yeah, I think so. That was a very different beast altogether, but one of the things that I value very much about this space is the people in it and the culture of helping one another out. I think it’s really important. Being able to have the reins on your creative project is very, very powerful and gratifying. I quickly found out that I wasn’t able to do all the things that are necessary to truly be a one-person show. I don’t just mean things I don’t know like how to write music. It’s things like the ropes of this industry, as well as people who have dedicated their careers to becoming good at that.
So getting help from folks in the industry who are good at that sort of thing, whether it be producers or a publisher, was really helpful. Yes, having control is really nice, but I quickly realized that there are some types of control there, like negotiating with platform holders and stuff like that, where it was nice to be able to give up some of that control again.
Q:Tunic’s level design is interconnected with tons of hidden shortcuts everywhere. How do you approach this style of level design?
Shouldice:In a previous life, I madepoint-and-click adventure games. Those have a very strict progression, you need to get the key before you go through the door. So when I was doing early gameplay flow design, like which areas do you go to, what do you need to get to go into this area, I had that same sort of structure where it was this graph of dependencies. Even then, I knew I wanted to make sure that you could subvert those expectations like “Oh, you can actually get to this area first. And this item – you don’t actually need this one, there’s some other way that you can get through there.” That was an important part I wanted to include, so I tried to express that in this diagram, and it just didn’t work. I realized everything was an exception, there was no line that was, “Oh, you, you absolutely 100% need to do this.”
Instead of starting from this position of “Here’s a formal structure, and I’m going to add exceptions,” I just accepted the idea that things can happen in any order. If we really, really need to make sure something happens in a particular way, we firm up certain boundaries as opposed to loosening them. For instance, you’re able to start the game, skip the stick, walk behind a waterfall, and go into a pitch-black dungeon. And if you are really good at it, you can make your way through that pitch-black dungeon and find yourself in a totally different area that’s hours into the game. We put a sword there because we know that speedrunners are going to go through there.
That was another thing that helped was knowing people on the team who were speedrunners, and just knowing thatspeedrunning is cool. A game where you may do things in any order is going to encourage people to try and speedrun it. Having that mindset meant, “Okay, anytime we add something, like, an area, a zone, or an item, how is it possible to get this before you get anything else?” and just embracing that idea. Once you’re at the point where it’s like, “I’m not going to worry about this extremely strict progression,” you’re sort of free to let those things happen. The hope is that that would help promote this feeling of genuine discovery.
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Q:People often bring upDark Soulswhen discussingTunic’s gameplay. How do you feel about this comparison?
Shouldice:It makes a lot of sense. I like theSoulsgames, particularly the first one that I played, which wasDark Souls. Because it has that “I’m just a tiny little guy in a big scary world full of monsters that are gonna kill me” vibe. I like that vibe. I like feeling like you are small and alone and afraid in a hostile world. And you’re just going to do your best and press forward as much as you may. That’s a cool feeling. So from that perspective, things like oblique storytelling, all of that stuff I really value. But the stuff that was more mechanicallyconnected toDark Soulssort of got shaken off during the development ofTunic.
Early on, when you died, you lost all your money. That was the way that it worked for a very long time. I just had in my head, like, “Okay, I’m modeling it after this game that I really like, hopefully, will evoke the same feelings.” But quite a ways into development, I realize that this is not really supporting the design in the way that it needs to, so it was changed. And so when you die, you leave something there, but it’s not all your money. That’s one of those things that you question, a design that you took for granted. You’re like, “Oh, this is much better when it’s changed,” you know, you shouldn’t be beholden to this thing.
Early on, thestamina systeminTunicchanged a lot. There was a whole debug panel where you could tweak every single thing imaginable like does attacking cost stamina? Can you attack when you have no stamina? How slow is the refill once you extinguish it? All kinds of stuff. And in the end, it didn’t make sense to adhere to this type of game that was quite different from whatTunicended up being.
Being a nimble little fox meant it always sucked when he ran out of stamina and couldn’t roll, so just let him roll. It always sucks when you are running, because running is fun, and you get into it an encounter and you don’t have any stamina because you’ve been running. Well, just let stamina refill while you’re doing it. All of these notions of, “It’s gotta be hard! The mechanics are realistic and working against you!” You have to critically evaluate all that stuff. “Don’t take it for granted” would be the advice that I would give myself if I could shout into the past.
Q:Tunichas been out for a little while now. How do you feel about the game’s reception so far? Any feedback that has particularly struck you?
Shouldice:The momentTuniccame out, I was convinced that it was going to be, at best, okay and at worst terrible response. I was actually flabbergasted when the response was as positive as it has been and continues to be. People will say, “Hey, I really like this game!” And that means so much. It’s hard to express how wonderful it has been. In particular with feedback, we heard combat difficulty could be tweaked a little bit, so we’ve added patches to address that.
But some of the things that people have built are amazing, like randomizers for the game. There’s a GitHub with a DLL – that is not officially supported by theTunicteam at all and cannot be endorsed by me – by a developer named Silent Destroyer, and I tried it out. It was amazing because it allowed me to play the game, kind of, for the first time. I don’t know if you’re familiar with randomizers, but it takes all the items in the world and scrambles them around.
You start the game, and you’re like “I have no idea what I was supposed to do.” That’s kind of the feeling that it’s supposed to evoke, and that was really wonderful. That, in particular, is a recent thing that sticks in my mind as a piece of reception. That someone would be willing to spend time not only doing this but doing such a good job of it was really lovely.
Q: After your experience with developingTunic, have you thought about what you’d like to do differently in your next projects?
Shouldice:It’d be nice if it took less time becauseTunicended up taking many, many years to make. I’ve been trying to be careful about how mentally invested I get in a new project because I want to take a little bit of a break, but the sort of stuff that I’ve been doing has been mostly recreational, like “for funsies” programming. I would love to be able to do something that is different enough that it feels freeing. You know, I love putting secrets in games, but if I make something new, I think having it be something that has characters, has a story, and isn’t about this sort of lonely experience of poring through an instruction booklet might be nice.
Q:Has the hero ofTunicalways been a fox? Or was there a time during development when you were experimenting with other characters?
Shouldice:It was basically always a fox. Early on, I didn’t have a whole lot of skill in 3D modeling, so it needed to be something low poly. And if the whole idea of the game is feeling like you are the character in the game, then making aharacter creatorto make the character look like you would have been a lot of work. Some sort of abstraction, a generalization like a lovable animal friend made sense. I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment when it was decided in my head, “Oh, it’s definitely a fox.” But you know, it was that and then it stuck. And it was that forever.
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Q:Tunicis having its first anniversary since its release this month. Are you doing anything to celebrate the occasion?
Shouldice:I think I’ll stay at home and take a deep breath and, I don’t know, salute to the past year or something like that. Nothing especially extravagant, I don’t think, because I have a lot of travel coming up. Keeping it pretty simple would be nice.
Q: Looking back on the last year, what have been some of the most memorable moments for you asTunic’s developer?
Shouldice: The moment that the game was released, when we pressed the button on Steam to sync up with it being announced. That was also the embargo moment, so pressing the button and being sort of overwhelmed when the stress of this seven-year project came down to a click, in a sense. That was so brain-filling that I had forgotten that there were going to be reviews, that people were now going to play the thing and had been playing it. That emotional whiplash from such stress to “Hey,the reviews are good!” was really memorable.
As far as other memorable things, I think less about key moments. There are certainly moments like we got an award at Dice. That’s incredible, right? What an honor. We are nominated for BAFTAs, that’s an incredible feeling. But the thing that warms my heart the most aren’t the individual moments, but just realizing that there is this community of people out there who are playing the game and enjoying it and have gotten so deep on something, you know, in my head still feels like such a small game. It’s a small team. It’s a little fox. It feels like such an honor to have the reception and the love of people that have played it. It’s a very mushy sentiment, but that is definitely something that I will carry with me for a long time.
Q: Speaking of the community, you were talking about things like the fan-made randomizer. Has there been anything else the community has made that spoke to you?
Shouldice:Yeah, the fan art people have made is incredible. And in particular, there are if you go to Reddit or GitHub and search for “Tuniclanguage,” there are piles of glyph construction toolkits that people have made, and I think there’s even one that will actually pronounce glyphs that you’ve made. That’s wild to me.
These incredibly talented people using their resources to work with content that I have produced are very cool. Then sometimes people will crochet little foxes and stuff like that. That’s always really wonderful.
Q:Tunicjokingly announced an April 1st sequel last year, but have you been considering how a sequel would expand on the original?
Shouldice:Tunicis a weird one, right? Like, what would a sequel to it look like? I feel like, in some ways, I kind of emptied my brain into this thing. There were plenty of ideas that didn’t make it, but yeah, I wonder. I don’t have plans forTunic 2at the moment. And like I said, anything that I work on next will probably be different and smaller. I guess the hope is that we will see more – not as a result ofTunicor anything, but just in general – that we will see more games that allow the player to explore at their own pace and make genuine discoveries about things.
I had the privilege ofplayingThe Outer Wildsafter I was done and after the game came out. I had been holding off on playing other ones for a long, long time. I was absolutely delighted by it. I think that there are a handful of games like that, where the experience of playing it is learning about this artifact. You know, there’s this ground truth that exists within this world, and you are not privy to it, but you have tools to slowly uncover stuff about it. I think that’s wonderful, and I hope to play more games like that.
Q:Earlier we were talking about how you were tweaking the stamina system and death penalties. Were there any other features or mechanics that ended up not working out in development?
Shouldice:Oh, yeah, piles and piles of stuff. When reflecting on an area of the game or a mechanic or an item or something like that, I realized that I think pretty much every element of the game has gone through at least one or two iterations. You know, like the dagger used to be a grenade.The ice dagger inTunicused to be an electric grenade if that gives you any sense of sort of how things changed.
There are so many little bits and pieces that ended up forming a mosaic, and all those individual pieces were meant to evoke feelings of wonder and mystery and discovery, and “I don’t really know how this works.” I never really could have anticipated how exactly they would all fit together, so things got repurposed and moved around and rotated constantly throughout development.
There’s a system of energy paths inTunic, these glowing purple tracks along the ground. At one point, you could travel through those, and that was really neat but fraught with its own problems and ended up getting scrapped for a number of reasons.
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Q: What are your hopes going into year two ofTunic’s life?
Shouldice:Well, we just announced a physical release for Switch and PS4 upgrade to PS5, and it has the highly-anticipated spoiler-filled instruction manual as part of it, as well as a separate hardcover book as a standalone thing. There’s a plush fox, so I guess merch is the answer. I’m excited about that. It will be cool to finally have this relic of the instruction manual in hand that has existed digitally and in my mind for so long. Seeing it actually in the flesh will be very neat.
Also, there’s a vinyl upcoming which I’m especially looking forward to because I had very little to do with the music itself. I don’t have any sort of musical talent, but Lifeformed – Terence Lee and Janice Kwan – did amazing work on it. I’m excited to have this physical manifestation of that. And I’m looking forward to relaxing, that’s not something that has to do withTunicin year two, but it’s surprising the amount of energy that not just supporting a game after a release takes, but recovering after having released the game takes.
So yeah, looking forward to pursuing new creative endeavors and I don’t know, maybe I’ll fire up that randomizer again, sometime.
Q:Tunichas all these diverse environments with various themes. Are there any in particular that stood out to you during development, or favorites of yours?
Shouldice:The forest is one of the first areas that I worked on, and aside from the neutral, “it’s the overworld” green grass sort of thing, I think that’s probably because I’m from Nova Scotia, in Canada, and we’ve got lots of forests that you can stroll through with that sort of dappled light filtering down.
I have very fond childhood memories of wandering through the parks here. Having that feeling, and, because that area and the effect of the dappled light and the green glow has been around for so long, I can look at it in old builds and see the visual progression and how things improved. I can see the scope creep on the aesthetic by looking at that area and its various forms, so that’s sort of special to me.
Q: Do you have any advice for developers who are considering heading up their own product?
Shouldice:I don’t know if it’s good advice. Most of my advice is about being carefulreceiving advice, but I have a few things.
One: accrue many data points. Don’t listen to like one cishet white guy who released one video game and use that as a model. Do your research and talk to people.
Don’t take seven years – I guess this is decent advice. But to that end, understand what your weaknesses are and your strengths are. Make something that plays to your strengths and get help with your weaknesses. Be okay with discovering new weaknesses as you go. Just as we canget better at 3D modeling, we can also get better at understanding where we are bad at things. And you know, seeking out advice or help there makes a lot of sense. Iteration is extremely valuable but time-consuming, so sketching early is so valuable.
This is obvious advice. Like “if you don’t have much of a plan, work loosely” sounds like very basic advice that everyone should automatically already know. But there are many circumstances where I didn’t do that, and it ended up costing me time. So that’s advice that I’m trying to carry forward into life, into doing projects. To keep things loose when you’re exploring, and you never know when you’re going to scrap something. So be careful how much effort you spend on that.
Q:Speaking of the physical manual release and the plush toy, do you have any ideas or plans for expanding outward into more merchandising or other formats like graphic novels?
Shouldice:Nothing to announce at this time. I think the key important thing was having that book done and doing it well. Some ancillary cool things are, you know, the plush and shirts and things like that. If people are interested in staying up to date on things like that there’s a mailing list that we’re usually pretty good about keeping people up to date on merch and stuff like that. So that would be where people could check it out attunicgame.com.
Q:Is there anything you’d like to say to our readers, especially those who might be unfamiliar with the game?
Shouldice:If you are reading this and you have not yet playedTunic, give it a go! It’s available on just about everything right now. I’ve been told that it’s the sort of game where it’s best to go into it without too many expectations. You know, “go in fresh,” as it were.
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Tunicis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
