Trending
Mimimi Games recently hosted a Q&A session, giving AltChar the opportunity to learn more about Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, beyond the preview build, which will also translate into a public demo on June 19, 2023, and what goes on behind the scenes.
We were greeted by Adriano Nicolosi, communications manager, and Matthias Kraut, communications lead, as well as Dominik Abé, the creative director and co-founder of Mimimi Games at the roundtable.
Following the introductions, we got into the nitty gritty that would allow us to learn more about Shadow Gambit's characters, a secret, past inspirations, current focus and future plans and aspirations.
AltChar: Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 both featured five characters initially but Shadow Gambit brings along eight. Was that decision made immediately by the studio or was the extended roster the result of a burst of inspiration during development?
Mimimi: It was something we wanted to tackle right from the start because we wanted the players to choose the team on the mission and for that, we needed more than five characters to make the decision more meaningful. It was there from the beginning - we actually wanted to have more but it's so hard to find good working and unique characters for those types of games so we're quite happy with the result.
AltChar: There is also only eight mentioned characters, even on the store page, but some of the art show nine of them. Are we in for a surprise?
Mimimi: (Laughs) Maybe. So mainly, that character is integral to the story so that is why he is on the art.
AltChar: Are there plans for even more characters? We practically have an army right now.
Mimimi: Currently, we are just focusing on finishing the game. The eight characters are the main focus but we remember the fans of Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics were always keen on more content. We are just focusing on finishing the game right now.
AltChar: Despite having so many characters, even in the past games, you always managed to make each and every one of the unique - not just the looks, they were genuinely unique personalities. Could you give us some insight on how you managed to accomplish that, perhaps through an example of your favourite character?
Mimimi: We think this was mainly possible because we switched to a fantasy setting. Having all the skills working in a realistic setting was very hard in previous games but now we had the freedom to go with gameplay first. We prototyped all the things we could imagine - anything the game now has and then tried to decide of it's going to be a character. Then we put on a theme that we thought would work well with the skills.
For example, there is a lady that can grow bushes. In the beginning, she was spawning walls and we were like "Yeah this is very cool but it is super OP, to just put a wall in front of someone". That is generally how we worked. In the end, it turned out to be a bush which still cool because it's always been a core element of the game and now you get to place it yourself.
AltChar: So you got to just let your imagination run wild?
Mimimi: Yes! Still, it's super hard to have a working character that is not breaking the game completely.
AltChar: There are some really inspired characters. For example, Mr Mercury with an anchor on his back. I would imagine a heavy object would run counter to subterfuge but this guy is the infiltrator. How did you guys come up with that?
Mimimi: He was this character that could dig himself into the ground, which was the base idea, but since he was a pirate, an anchor was a cool thing, then we gave him a magical portal and that's kinda how it worked.
AltChar: This is your first self-published game. Did that put too much strain on a studio of 35 people?
Mimimi: I think that we were able to do that because now we have a lot of experience in the genre. It was a hard process but we did make some pretty clever decisions in the beginning that allowed us to pull this off. You really need that experience in the genre - if we were like "Let's make an RPG", I think that would be a horrible failure.
Still, we took the biggest leap in the genre, we took the most risk and in the beginning, we were like "Is this gonna work?" and then we prototyped and prototyped. To be fair, it was not too late into development when we were like "Okay, this really should work". It took maybe a year or a year and a half and then we were pretty confident we were on the right track. It was experience, luck, good planning and a good vision in the beginning.
AltChar: How challenging was it to balance the game with time manipulation in mind?
Mimimi: There was already pausing in Desperados 3 so it didn't change too much. The hardest thing was not knowing which character you will have for each mission, so missions need to work for any character set and that was very hard to balance out.
For example, one character can shoot other characters over any walls so there is a character that can make any wall that blocks a path basically meaningless so we had to figure out how to counter that and make the mission still challenging in any situation.
AltChar: Real-time tactics was not a popular genre in the 2010s but you guys still went for it and then made history with three games in a row that were universally acclaimed. So how did you actually decide to go down that road?
Mimimi: (Dominik Abé) I'm a huge, huge Commandos and Desperados fan myself. I think that's one of the main reasons and I was always wondering if it's not about the genre being unpopular. It was more that it didn't exist at the time. So I was like, "This can't be it and there must be somebody else that still loves such gameplay ideas" and yeah, I think we got lucky with it and executed a quite good game, so it was a really personal belief and taste.
There was also something that convinced publishers at that time. It was a period when all the games were easy and then Dark Souls came and everybody was like "Oh, we can make hard games again?" so that was something we used to convince the publishers back then but it was really hard to find a publisher for Shadow Tactics and Daedalic were the cool guys that believed in our ideas.
AltChar: So is there a possibility of a Commandos game made by Mimimi in the future?
Mimimi: At the moment, I think the chances are very low because somebody else is kind of working on one so I don't know what the future will be like but a new Commandos is in development by somebody else.
AltChar: Alright, thank you very much for the answers!
Mimimi: Thank you!
DON'T MISS:
