Last year, German developer Mimimi Productions drew a lot of attention to his real-time tactical stealth game Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun , inspired by such old projects as Desperados and Commandos.

Shadow Tactics has an intriguing design (see this article on dynamic recognition mechanics ). It became a huge success for Mimimi - despite the fact that the company almost collapsed during the release process. You can read more about how this happened (and what lessons the developers have learned) in this honest post-game game written by Mimimi's founding colleagues Johannes Roth and Dominic Abe.
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About a year ago, Mimimi was still little known. Our previous three-dimensional action adventure The Last Tinker: City of Colors performed well but didn’t attract a large audience.

By December 2016, our biggest dreams came true: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun , our declaration of love for Commandos and Desperados , finally came out and won the recognition of players and the press.

At the same time, we were almost bankrupt and had already fired most of the team. We had no money to survive another month.

In this post-mortem, the two founders of Mimimi, Dominic Abe (creative director) and Johannes Roth (managing director), will tell in detail about what they were right about and what (terrible) were wrong.


We create games and suffer because of this since 2011.

What we did right

1) They put everything on the line, achieving high quality

Mouth: Shadow Tactics was released on December 6, 2016, the day before the German Developer Awards, where we won awards in four categories, including “Best German Game” and “Best Studio”. At about the same time, the first reviews began to appear. Ratings and verdicts exceeded our highest expectations: rating 86 from GameStar, 92 points from PC Gamer, even Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku praised us. Streamers and letsplery recorded hundreds of hours of gameplay. In that month alone, we sold over 60,000 copies, which was twice as large as our biggest forecast. On Steam, we now have 98% positive reviews, and this seems to us to be something surreal.


The whole team, including interns and freelancers, at the 2016 German Developer Award.

A year earlier, in December 2015, we could not predict such a result. The development process went only twelve months and we only got to the release of the alpha version. In parallel with the creation of all the content, we constantly worked on the “vertical cut” of the game - the level that would later become the fifth mission - “The Murder of Mr. Yabu”; he was always highly polished and served as a quality bar for the rest of the game.

Having released the alpha version, we realized that the "vertical slice" is actually much more beautiful than we imagined the game at the very beginning - which means that it will take much longer to create. We learned a lot in these first twelve months: about the development tools, about the game itself, and how to make the graphics create the best impression.


Wider gameplay recording, initial pitch for publisher


Widget recording gameplay, "vertical cut" after 21 months of development

We realized that it was impossible to return to the pitch chart, but the new quality level of the whole game obviously did not fit into our original schedule. At this stage, we began to invest all the company's financial reserves in the project in order to stretch the production time for another three months. Our publisher Daedalic Entertainment was able to stretch the deadline, allowed to cancel all the planned levels for the DLC and funded another one, fourth month. It is worth noting in parentheses that the experience of Daedalic as a quality developer (for example, the Deponia series) greatly helped us in this situation, because they had already encountered the same problems many times. Changing the schedule not only meant improving graphics, but also significantly increased the dynamism of each level.

At that time, we made the decision to complete the game in the best way possible - having agreed both within the team and with Daedalic itself. I very clearly told the team that we should “put everything on the line”. In case of failure, it will be Game Over for Mimimi. But for us there was no other choice, we were ruled by our passion and love. And although our contribution has excellently paid off, including the highest Metacritic rating for the German game since Crysis 2 (2011), the work was a heavy burden for the whole team and we definitely don’t want to worry again. As you can guess, we will tell about it in more detail in the section “What we did wrong”.

2) Revived dead genre

Abe : creating a remake of your favorite game is the dream of every developer. In 2008, when I began to study game design, I spoke with Moritz Wagner (now he is the lead game designer at Mimimi) that Commandos is one of my favorite game franchises (another one is Little Big Adventure ; if that I am ready to take it). Moritz at that time was recording excellent rap videos in which he dressed as a ninja, so in my mind the image of the game ninja in the Commandos style was created. I told Moritz about it and we laughed: “Ha, one day, when we become important and successful, we can create such a game.” But it turned out that it was not a joke. In 2014, we talked about the idea of ​​“ Commandos with Ninjas” in Daedalic and soon signed a contract to publish the game. Now we have a real chance to revive a real-time tactics genre considered dead.

I want to explain why it seems to me that we have achieved success:

I'm a big fan of the genre. As a fan and designer, I longed for the spiritual heir to these games: to feel that you are in a strangely realistic place that breathes life; to sneak among countless enemies and "shoot" them, one by one, creating the most cunning plans, making risky moves, and sometimes relying on pure luck and reflexes. I was very confident that I could create a game that fans would love, and often in the production process I had an instinctive feeling that it would fit the game. Of course, this does not mean that I was always right. Transferring these feelings to other team members and implementing them in choosing aspects of game design has often been a difficult and lengthy process. But in general, knowing how the game should be felt with an eye on its spiritual predecessors helped us a lot. It was much easier than doing something from scratch. It is also worth noting that Daedalic, although it gave us regular feedback, never had any creative control over our game - we were actually free to fulfill our desires.

But it’s enough to talk about feelings; let's take a look at the analytical side of things. At the preproduction stage, we analyzed the evolution of the genre and looked for concepts that remain unique today. We often compared the first game of the Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines series with its own continuation of Commandos 2: Men of Courage , the most critically acclaimed representative of the genre.


2001 Pyro Studios game Commandos 2: Men of Courage

Both parts are stealth-oriented tactical games in real time in the entourage of the Second World War. You control a group of soldiers, narrow specialists who carry out missions to sabotage in enemy territory. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines introduced us to a team of player-controlled characters with a highly developed set of skills that depend on each other and force the player to combine their unique skills. The game is somewhat similar to chess - you have a very limited set of actions and strict rules, but they provide endless possibilities. In Commandos 2 there was a more realistic and open approach, which gave the player a lot more skills and opportunities. The game eliminated artificial restrictions (for example, in the first part only one character could use a specific type of weapon) and added new features (collecting enemy equipment, etc.). So, since judging by the reviews of players and the press, Commandos 2 turned out to be better, it seemed obvious that it should be chosen as the main source of inspiration for creating a spiritual heir. But we did not do that.

It seemed to us that Commandos 2 “diluted” the uniqueness of the series, created in the first part, turning it from a chess-like game into a more realistic simulation with added structural complexity. For example, by adding more possible actions, the developers made the game more difficult to master. We did not want to create more gameplay depth in this way. Therefore, we decided on the first pillar of the game design - “Creating Depth Without Adding Structural Complexity” - which we sought to adhere to in all aspects of game design. The “realistic” approach taken by Commandos 2 also made all the player’s characters a bit too strong, which damaged a unique aspect of the team game created earlier — limiting realism to balance gameplay.

Let's look at an example that allowed players to dishonestly exploit those introduced in the second part of the system: the diver in Commandos 2 had a very powerful skill of throwing a knife, which is balanced by the need to raise the knife after a throw. The Green Beret also had a knife, but he could not throw it. Due to the added inventory system, the player could pass the green beret's knife to the diver, turning it into a powerful killing machine armed with two knives, while usually the powerful green beret went down in possibilities to an outsider.

In Shadow Tactics, we again focused on a set of skills that were limited for each character and had no transmission options, and created the game in such a way that each character's skill was strong in combination with the skills of other team members, but remaining effective on its own. In the end, by focusing on the first game in the genre and transforming it in a direction that was different from the development of its followers, we were able to revive the genre so that today it felt unique and fresh.

3) Creating a new brand in the old genre

Abe: the revival of the "dead" genre is often associated with the reworking of an already existing brand. For example, this was the case with XCOM: Enemy Unknown , which returned the genre of step-by-step tactics to the world on an AAA-scale. Having no means, no opportunities, no copyright in the real-time tactical stealth genre, we had to invent our own brand ourselves. It had its own risks: the fans might not like the new game because of the absence in it of important elements of their favorite projects - entourage, characters, artistic style, maybe just a big name, from which mention it becomes pleasant to them. We needed to invent something new on all points.

As for the entourage, we took the risk and dramatically changed the scenery, moving the game to Japan in the Edo period. We were confident in this decision, because we felt how critical the match between entourage and gameplay is for players so that they never feel unnatural. The image of a secretly moving ninja, slowly destroying an entire army, can be considered even more convincing than the image of the soldier of the Second World War, which is easier to associate with loud shooting. The hidden ninja stereotype is so strong that from the very beginning we were sure that it was perfect for the genre.

By choosing the artistic style of Shadow Tactics, we also corresponded to the new entourage, because we used Japanese ink as a source of inspiration. This allowed us to create a unique image, instantly recognizable in any screenshot. That is what we wanted to achieve when developing a new style that was easier to achieve with stylized, rather than photo-realistic graphics. As far as it was the right decision for the genre, we will describe below, in the section “What we did wrong: style vs. genre”.

But if everything is so tied to the new entourage and ninjas, then why should the game be called Shadow Tactics with only a small reference in the Blades of the Shogun subtitle - we did not even have the word "Ninja" in the title? The point was that Daedalic and I wanted to think more broadly and create a brand that could be used not only in one entourage. In our time, such a strategy is very common - remember Assassin's Creed , Total War , etc. For a small studio, such a move is quite risky, because it often means that the name of the game will be too vague. But we liked the idea of ​​exploring different surroundings, and now we have a brand that allows us to do this. So even if we fail to create Shadow Tactics: Legions of Rome , then we just had one less problem.

4) Transferring the genre to the console

Abe: from the very beginning an important part of our plan was to transfer the genre to the console. Before us, an attempt was made by Commandos 2 , more or less successfully porting the mouse and keyboard controls. We were fairly confident that we could provide better gameplay on modern consoles, but from the point of view of design, the biggest difficulty was correct control from the gamepad. Another serious problem was the performance of consoles.

From the very beginning, we were confident that we wanted to develop control for PC and consoles in parallel, in order to make it equally good on both platforms. At the same time, it was always obvious that in no case should our main platform, PC, be allowed to suffer from possible control limitations from the gamepad. In the process of design and implementation, it became increasingly clear to us that testing the capabilities regarding control from the gamepad helped us determine the necessary parts of mechanics and simplify their use.

Example: After killing an enemy, a player most often must lift a corpse to hide it. In our first design, killing and raising the body required two different user actions. But when prototyping this function for a gamepad, we realized that these commands should be carried out in one action - by long pressing to kill, and then lifting the body. Of course, we also implemented this feature to control the mouse and keyboard - to do the same. You can hold down the Ctrl key (the Up and Interaction key).

As for the technical aspects of the console version, most of all we were afraid of problems with the frame rate and time for fast saving / loading. Shadow Tactics was our first console project, so we had almost no experience with consoles. In addition, the Unity 3D game engine did not have the best reputation on consoles at that time. But since we have been working with Unity for the last seven years, we couldn’t lose our skills, switching to the engine with the best reputation on consoles. For a while we developed versions for PC and consoles in parallel, and constantly checked whether it was possible to achieve at least acceptable performance on consoles. However, at a certain stage, we decided not to release versions at the same time, because we needed all the resources to release a version for the PC.

After the completion of the “golden master disk” for the PC, we immediately returned to the console version and started testing the assemblies again - with terrible results. Some levels reached a constant 15 fps in zones in which the player was supposed to spend about 30 minutes each; for example, this was the case in the initial Matsuyama City area. Over time, the “fast” save / load was also all bad, saving took up to 10 seconds, and loading - 50-60 seconds each. The task was clear: we needed to at least double the frame rate, speed up saving about 5 times, and load at about 20. And all this without reducing the quality of the graphics. The typical “kill me” is a moment in the life of a game developer.


Level "Matsuyama City": one of the scenes with the worst speed on consoles)

We improved the save / load time by pre-generating the serialization code in the code files and caching during the execution of all that is possible. Downloading was still not fast enough, because recreating a GameObject and adding its components on the Unity side took about 15 seconds. As a result, we managed to get around this problem by dynamically creating GameObject templates that contained all the necessary components and cloning them. The final results even surprised me a little: in the worst case, saving now took 1-2 seconds, and loading - 3 seconds.

To optimize the overall frame rate, we have taken two important steps. First, we independently grouped the models into large fragments, which approximately fit the screen size in the perspective of our camera, in order to reduce the number of draw calls and the clipping operation. Secondly, we have made the hierarchy of the scene more flat, which is very important for moving objects, in order to avoid multiple matrix calculations. Having made another thousand other optimizations, we achieved a stable 30 fps on PS4 and XBox One. In addition, William Armstrong and John Elliott from Spotlight Team Unity helped us greatly with the console version and the creation of special Unity assemblies, allowing us to accomplish the goals set by the team. Thank them very much!

By rewriting and optimizing our part of the code so that the engine needed to perform as little work as possible, we were able to improve the overall performance. We got an important lesson - only you yourself know how your game works, and what you need. Commercial engines like Unity do much more work, because they are not intended for any particular game or genre, so optimizing the load on the engine is your task.

The report on Unite Europe 2017 by our technical director Frieder Melke and gameplay programmer Philip Wittershagen is described in more detail.

As a result, we achieved success and developed a game on Unity that worked at high speed on Xbox One and PS4 without sacrificing graphics quality. Therefore, we are very happy and satisfied with the console versions that received the same high marks as the PC version.

5) Marketing the game, trying to reach hardcore fans

Mouth: Unlike our previous game The Last Tinker , we knew exactly what the target audience of Shadow Tactics should be. The game was supposed to be difficult from the very beginning and attract real fans of the genre. Nevertheless, the marketing of Shadow Tactics still turned out to be quite complicated, because during the production process we faced three serious problems:

1. Attempting to reach hardcore fans: those who loved the old games of this genre are now much older, it’s harder to reach them, and they probably don’t play games anymore.
2. Attempting to reach a new audience: the revival of a dead and forgotten genre meant that young players do not know anything at all about it. In addition, Commandos and Desperados were exceptionally good in Europe, but many US gamers (one of the most important markets) have never heard of them.
3. “Selling” the visual component: taking into account the unchangeable perspective of the camera and the real time of the gameplay, it was very difficult to create a sense of cinematography in the trailers or gameplay videos. Games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle took great steps in the right direction to overcome the limitations of their genre (active angles, many cutscenes), but after thinking about similar concepts in our real-time gameplay, we realized that will not work or will even distract the players. In addition, we were a much smaller team with a very limited budget, so the clarity of the graphics was at a sufficient level only in the usual camera perspective.

We have made a lot of efforts to solve all these problems. It seems to us that the following has worked:

Attending events such as PAX and gamescom, we often received feedback from newcomers to the genre that our game was "isometric Metal Gear Solid " or "hardcore Assassin's Creed with several characters." It was too much an oversimplification, but we knew that we could never compete with these games or reach their audience. On the other hand, we also quickly realized that almost all gamers who gave Shadow Tactics a chance, even in spite of their initial timidity, quickly fell in love with the game. This happened all the time at these events, so we felt a huge difference compared to our previous projects.

This convinced our communications director, Dennis Husak, to insist on the release of the demo: the game had to sell itself. We had to trust the quality we achieved and let the people try it themselves. No trailer will be able to have the same effect, so when we decided to go this way, we made a free demo the basis of an advertising campaign.


“Play the demo!” Was our main motto even after the game was released.

We released a demo on November 21, 2016. Due to this, the number of "wishlist" with our game quickly increased from 15 thousand to 40 thousand, just two weeks before the release. For reference: the first 15 thousand wishes were collected in almost seven months. The day before the release, the game was already in 150 thousand lists, and a year later - about 700 thousand. We didn’t carry out any pre-order campaigns, so we thought that all wish lists before release were much more valuable - that is, it was a “Buy right after release” signal, rather than “I’ll wait for discounts to begin.” We sold more than 400 thousand copies for desktop platforms, and the demo was downloaded more than 160 thousand times.

Suddenly the game community has become much more vibrant. Our AMA on Reddit was a huge success, and even Live Stream on Facebook gathered about 31,000 users according to FB statistics, which means it was all worth the effort. The release of the demo was the best way to solve all three problems, and the community really liked that we released it in 2016. Moreover: every time someone asked about the gameplay, someone from the community would definitely advise just to download the demo we’ve posted. We publicly stated that we need the support of everyone in the dissemination of information about our game unknown to anyone. Thus, thanks to our very first fans, we managed to reach out to many players in the original Commandos.

For the record: the decision to release the demo was not an easy step. Dennis had to convince all of us of this idea, because I was afraid that the players would be enough of the same level, after which they would go to the next AAA game with a price of $ 10. Experience of the gaming industry told us that the release of a demo harms sales, so in fact it was for us a serious "leap of faith."

What we did wrong

1) They put everything at stake, almost becoming bankrupt

Mouth: As stated earlier, the release of Shadow Tactics was the fulfillment of our dream: we created a successful game with ratings that we hadn’t even dreamed of.

However, shortly before the game was released, we canceled two subsequent projects, were almost on the verge of bankruptcy, and half of the team, including the most long-time employees, were already dismissed - we saved money to release the console version with the minimum possible team.

Although the success story, in which everything is at stake, sounds in some sense romantic, in fact it was a terrible experience. And we had to anticipate it: adding four more months to the project schedule, we were able to make the game much better, but we’ve exhausted all our savings. When we realized that our reserve plans for new projects were not working as planned, we realized that everything was going to hell. We completely invested in Shadow Tactics , so we didn’t prepare new pitches, and we had nothing to offer to new partners. In addition, they, of course, waited for the release of the game and the SteamSpy data for several weeks before deciding to sign the project.

This put us in a terrible position: the team stood on the stage in front of the entire German gaming industry, was happy and at the same time understood that this could be the last month of the studio's life.

Partly because of luck, partly because of the release of a decent game, we managed to talk to the publishers after the release, and none of them decided to take advantage of the situation and did not try to force us to make a bad deal. Negotiations, which usually take months, were quick and fair.As a result, to our surprise, we had to choose one of the projects, for each of which we would gladly undertake. I clearly remember how I was traveling by train on December 23, just a day before Christmas, and wrote the last letter to the team, telling them that the contract was signed and we were safe for a while.


Mimimi after getting rid of all the hard paperwork.

When we returned to work in early January, we ritually destroyed all the papers that were in any way connected with the potential death of our studio. It sounds fun, but I will say for myself: the whole situation was heavy upon me for the next six months. Even when we returned to normal, I felt stress and sleep problems, which took several weeks to realize.

Mimimi has always been a safe haven of sorts, a company that never laid off anyone because of a cut in funds. We have always had a budget in our account for at least the next three months. For the first time, we felt so unstable, and we knew about it for several months. Changing the workload without increasing the budget from a reliable source was a risky and bad decision, because the chaos that fell on us was much stronger than expected. I consider it my personal mistake that I did not secure subsequent projects with special contract terms. I usually do this, but for personal reasons and because of the trust in people this time was not done.

2) Lack of resources to develop new content

Mouth: As mentioned above, during the production process we had to cancel all the levels planned for DLC in order to fully concentrate on the main game, which was the right decision for the initial release. But we are a small team, so when we signed an agreement on a new project, we did not have the resources to work on the current one. Things like patching or adding new languages ​​have become a huge burden. Although many fans asked for additional content and we would love to let it out, we simply did not have the opportunity.

There were two good reasons for this:

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Although the financial aspect played a role, the lack of free time turned out to be the most important obstacle. We would never have decided to release a mediocre DLC, just to make money. Probably, it was worth releasing the DLC immediately after the release, but it is always easier to look back than to predict, and at that moment it simply did not happen.

3) Violation of unspoken rules of consoles

Abe: Transferring a classic PC genre with mouse and keyboard control is a really difficult task that we managed to solve with some great games like Diablo 3 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown . When designing the control scheme from the controller, we tried to take into account the habits of console players as much as possible, because we did not want to strain them with the new genre and new management. However, this is not entirely possible, because some systems, for example, cameras with free movement, rotation and zoom, are rarely found on consoles, and there are no control standards for them from the controller for them. In the end we came to this control scheme on PS4:


Shadow Tactics control layout on PS4.

There are also “natural” conventions, such as a “square” for killing and a “dagger” for jumping; There are other common controls, such as the L1 side buttons for the skill wheel and L2 for aiming. And there is also a right-click trigger R2 to activate a special camera mode, which is completely unusual for players, because this button is usually used for shooting, speeding up or other important gameplay actions.

So why did we choose the trigger? Because we needed a button that allowed us to control the stick when pressed. Consequently, the only options were side buttons; besides all the other buttons were busy with more familiar actions. Obviously, this was contrary to the expectations of console players, and it was possible that it was even more noticeable due to the fact that the rest of the control scheme adhered to the “console rules”. On the other hand, we are still not sure whether it was worth tying such a complex new function, like camera control, to a button that players are used to performing other actions. On the other hand, we believe that this was the right decision, because the player would be better aware of this feature.

However, other problems were also obvious: we missed the opportunity to tell more about the camera control capabilities in the tutorial, creating it in the same space as for the PC version. In most cases this was quite normal; Perhaps this was the cause of our mistake - we lost sight of the fact that large parts of the tutorial should be different depending on the management and target audience. We changed only the displayed text and images, and it was necessary to change some parts in the structure of the tutorial.

In addition, we did not perform a detailed game test for users of consoles only. Players accustomed to playing on PCs and consoles may have completely different expectations compared to players playing exclusively on consoles. Probably, the fact that most of the players on the PC were pleasantly surprised by the possibility of a full-fledged game with the controller did not allow us to collect more detailed reviews.

In the end, nothing terrible happened and the console audience reacted favorably to us, because it was something new and the players did not have examples of other games that solved the same problems in much better ways. But we still think that there are many ways to further fine-tune the game, especially with regard to management.

4) Style vs. genre

Abe: As I said, we always strive to create in our games a unique graphic style that makes them instantly recognizable and memorable. For Shadow Tactics, we initially drew inspiration from traditional Japanese ink drawings and tried to create our own style, combining them with elements of comic style and canvas-like materials. This style was stunning and seemed to fit our team of artists, who had already created the unique graphics of The Last Tinker in papier-mâché style.

After the demonstration of our first graphic prototypes, we received a lot of feedback that the game is too much like a mobile game. We developed the game for PC / consoles, so, of course, it did not suit us, but at the same time it was rather ironic, because in the first pitch Shadow Tactics had to go on mobile, and part of the graphic ideas remained. As a result, they initially influenced the graphic style of the PC / console version.


Our first graphic prototype, 2014

We agreed with the reviews and began to develop a less abstract style that we felt needed a richer and more detailed world. The process of developing the final style was unexpectedly long, and then led to a longer production phase.

When we discussed the choice of entourage, it was very important for us to perfectly match the real-time tactics genre, but we did not consider the artistic style as thoroughly. If you look at other tactical / strategic games, most of them use photorealistic style, including the old Commandos and Desperados games.. Today we assume that our stylized graphics instantly scared away many hardcore tactical fans who did not even have time to take a closer look at Shadow Tactics . We received only a few reviews that the graphics were too “comic book”, but we still didn’t understand how important this was. We also missed the chance to conduct AB testing at the start of production in order to define a style that is pleasant to most fans of real-time tactics.

On a more personal level of choice and taste, we are quite pleased with the resulting graphics and have heard many positive reviews. And trying to create a realistic style was not really a good option for our team, because it did not match the taste of the team, and it was difficult to achieve with the efforts of a small team.

5) Marketing of the game: it was still not possible to reach hardcore fans

Mouth: Despite the rather successful release, it was still difficult for us to get through to people - even with all these great reviews and press attention. That's what happened as a result, we didn’t do it as planned:

A few weeks after the game was released, someone from Germany visited our studio and told me that we had released an amazing game, but he heard about it only two weeks before the release and our marketing was very bad. I replied: “We were told about us several times in all German gaming media, both digital and paper, from the moment of the announcement of the beginning of the development to the release. We were on one of the largest channels of German letsplerov and streamers. Even the foreign press, like Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku, spoke about us. ”

But that person did not use any of these channels, despite the fact that he was a gamer and part of our target audience. We really didn’t know how to get to him, except for appearing on his favorite channels, which were too exotic, and we couldn’t afford to put up posters at bus stops. When we showed the game at events after the release, the same problem arose: we thought that we were good at reaching the audience, but many potential buyers had never even heard about our game.

Although the demo helped us a lot, many gamers did not know about its existence. On Steam, we found a lot of people who didn’t even suspect the possibility of downloading, possibly due to the strange location of the button outside the game purchase area. There are still players who are waiting for a serious discount to check the performance of the game on their machines, not suspecting that the demo is from them in just one click. On PlayStation 4, our game is not even shown in the demo version category, because we decided to publish a trial version instead. In essence, it is similar to the PC demo, but it allows you to unlock the full version inside the running game without downloading a new application. This is very convenient for users and does not present any problems, but because of this we were in a bad position in the store.

Having met with the situation “how do we sell the game, presenting it in a cinematic, attractive way”, we tried very hard to show something explaining the genre to beginners. Our preview trailer was aimed at creating a cinematic approach based on the real visual component of the game, but people complained about animation and graphics.

In the release trailer, we tried to follow the path of the rendered graphics to attract a large audience, but as a result we did not succeed. The second, prerender and more stylized game release trailer on the console suffered the same fate, and even worse. At the same time, compared with the development budget, this was a very significant investment. If you watched the video, you immediately realized that six months after the release, we actually did not have a trailer with real gameplay. It was released shortly before the release on the consoles, because no one had the resources to do it before. We thought that the first trailer was our chance to really talk about how Shadow Tactics works and is played. Looking back, I think we needed to focus primarily on the gameplay trailer and just accept the factthat the game engine does not work to create a blockbuster trailer. To create a sensation, prerender trailers must be very large and expensive, or an incredibly clever and inexpensive idea is required that will make the trailer viral.

Summarize

Probably, there are hundreds of thousands more people in the world who might like our game, but they simply are unaware of its existence. And, frankly, we do not know how to reach them. Those players who hesitate may scare away the graphic style, the name or the fact that we have lost a lot of time before the release on the consoles, and maybe the reason for this we cannot even catch.

On the other hand, most players in Shadow Tactics are very pleased with the game on all platforms. And all interested parties have earned money, and this is important, because we have proved that the genre is profitable. It is not only worth the rebirth, but also allows us to create something else in this genre! And we are very happy about this.

Given the success of the game, it is difficult to say whether it was the right decision to invest all this money and resources, risking everything. We can only say that we do not want to repeat this and we will try to find another solution, of course, by making sure that the game does not suffer.

Many developers are faced with this dilemma: putting everything at stake and risking their team is terrible, but it is also terrible to release a raw game, because you will never be able to redeem the first bad impression. The situation is not facilitated by the fact that excellent quality games come out every day, which do not manage to earn enough money. We very much appreciate our success and now our task is to develop it.