#Mortal shell game full

The shells were the intersection of our desire to have a class-based system, the player character’s lore, and leaning into our strengths as a team. Can you elaborate on what inspired the team to move forward with this design? The game features a very unique premise that allows players to inhabit different 'shells' in order to take up different classes and to provide extra health. This mechanic is more divisive than others, and ends up splitting players: some give up and use consumable items to heal, others may learn to parry against specific enemies they are having a hard time with, and then we have speed and challenge runners who don’t need any healing and tend to exclusively use the offensive ripostes. The intent was to make parrying the primary way to heal. The second most important mechanic in regard to rewarding skill and aggression is the parry/riposte system. We knew right away that we wanted to exclude shields from the player’s arsenal since they, as Bloodborne so eloquently put it, “engender passivity.” At one point, we’d considered having the player find a shield, only to have their character throw it away in disgust. Rewarding aggressive combat and player skill were two important pillars for us right from the start. Can you elaborate on how the team designed it? Mortal Shell has been praised for its methodical, yet offensive-minded combat system. Our ambition and appetite also grew throughout the process and, together, we set out to construct a game with an immersive world and characters in it for players to explore. The atmosphere, overall, got a lot darker than it was initially in Dungeonhaven, taking inspiration from horror themes. Once we developed the core concept of possessing the bodies of fallen warriors, we also created a twisted lore around it and built the world to support it. This is where the game really started to shape its unique flavor and identity, grew vastly in scope and eventually became Mortal Shell. We really gelled with Vitaly and Dmitry Parkin, and at that point, things started to feel a bit like being in a band. When we merged studios with Black Sky Symmetry, it was another game changer. In the end, even though we cut and changed a lot of things throughout development, the core identity of a hardcore third-person action RPG always remained. There was at one point a miniaturization potion that you could either drink to shrink yourself or throw at an enemy to do the same. Once we did that, we were able to pretty quickly lock in our vertical slice, which we called Dungeonhaven.Īnother big feature we cut was the ability for the player to throw any item in the game. We eventually abandoned the procedural approach: the limitations on environment art, lighting, level design, and gameplay made us decide to return to a more traditional handcrafted approach. At the same time, we were iterating on what eventually became the harden mechanic. We’d spent quite a bit of time testing the Marketplace plugin Dungeon Architect. Sure, and thank you! In the earliest days of the project, before it was called Dungeonhaven, Anton and Andrew were experimenting with procedural generation. The creative directors go on to explain why using keyframe animations was a better fit for the title than using motion capture and elaborate on how they developed the game’s imposing enemies, unsettling non-linear world, and excellent visuals.Ĭongratulations on the launch and success of Mortal Shell! Considering the game started out as another project, Dungeonhaven, several years ago, can you tell us about the evolution of that project and how it morphed into Mortal Shell? They also share how they walked the fine line between making combat challenging, but never unfair. The trio discuss how they approached designing Mortal Shell’s offensive-minded combat while incorporating an innovative blocking mechanic that provides players new tactical maneuvers within the Souls-inspired genre. To see how such a relatively small studio was able to pack such a tremendous punch, we interviewed Cold Symmetry co-creative directors Andrew Murray, Anton Gonzales, and Vitaly Bulgarov.

#Mortal shell game full

New studio Cold Symmetry recently made a big splash in the game-development scene with its debut title Mortal Shell, which Trusted Reviews called, “one of the year’s biggest gaming surprises, offering a deep, fascinating journey into a melancholic world that’s well worth taking.” Though the team that worked on the game was relatively small, averaging about 15 members across the title’s roughly two-year development, they’re full of seasoned vets with developers who worked on movies like Alita: Battle Angel and games like Ghost of Tsushima and the Call of Duty franchise.