The pitch
By January 2015, we at Nuberu Games had launched our first mobile game, Aesthar. To decide what would we do next, we set up a pitch meeting, where all team members would pitch some ideas for games. The requirements were:
- Mobile interface
- Development time under 4 months (we were a four people team then)
- Since last game had been a runner, it should be another genre
At that meeting I pitched a 2D beat-em-up with touch controls, an Starfox-like space shooter and a tiny twin-shooter roguelike where a young metalhead would be fighting musicians with his guitar.
The team liked the metalhead game a lot but they wanted it to be more than a tiny mobile game, so we put it on hold until we could develop a bigger game based on that idea.
Fast forward to May 2015, we just launched Twisted Rocket on mobile, and soon we realized that we were wrong focusing on mobile games: we thought that we could play it safe with mobile games developed in a short time, but soon we realized that without a big investment on marketing (basically purchasing downloads to be on the top charts) and a solid game loop and in.app purchases that keeps players playing and investing in the game, a mobile game could not sustain its development cost. We liked to make finished games that didn’t need additional purchases or micro-payments, so we decided to go big or go home. The business side (namely Ulises) estimated that we could spent about 6 months developing a bigger game and still manage to eat regularly and pay our rents.
This is when Metal Tales comes around for a second time: The team decided to go and make it on PC. I was asked to retool it to be a more complete game, that could have a solid early access version around 6 months of development. A week later, I had an initial draft presented to the team as a PowerPoint presentation of around 40 slides that touched every aspect of the game, so the we could start working on concept art, prototyping and the final game design.
Background
As a teen I was obsessed with Heavy Metal and Power Metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Mägo de Oz, Avalanch, and Barón Rojo, and as I grew up and discovered the different Metal styles and expanded my tastes into Thrash, Death, Progressive, Doom, Black, Grind and a lot of different styles. I even played guitar in a couple of Thrash and Death metal bands, and lately I’ve played drums on a Doom band.
So when I find myself in the position of making a game with a solid team, I wanted to make a game about this huge part of my life, especially because there are very few games set in the Metal world.
Themes
I wanted the game to be focused only on metal, the musicians and their fans, so I quickly ditched the idea of fighting musicians of different genres, because I wanted the game to be 100% focused on the metal culture and community. Metal is massive and it’s formed by a lot of different personalities, aesthetics, ideology and mythology. The game must reflect that.
To allow the team to have all this different aspects of metal into this small game, we talked about how we could be fighting metal fans and musicians without having a negative tone into them, so we came up with the story of the corruption: An evil wild force, known as the Corruption has been spreading into the metal community, possessing fans and musicians, and our hero must liberate them with his music.
I also wanted the game to be set in our current time and world, but with a little fantasy spìn (after all, you’ll be shooting with a guitar), so the game locations will be places where a metal concert could be held: Bars, arenas, metal festivals… Each level will be a metal concert, where the final boss is the lead guitar from the band that is playing the venue.
Gameplay
The basic gameplay it’s fairly straightforward: It’s a twin stick shooter roguelike. Each level will contain a variable number of interconnected rooms randomly generated. Each room can contain different enemies and items, and the player can’t exit the room before he had liberated all the enemies inside.
Since your weapon is a guitar, the items that players will pick and use are related. In addition to collecting guitars, that will change the firing stats, players will find effect pedals, guitar strings and other guitar related perks, that will change the form and sound of the shots. In addition to that, the player will find other items, not only related to guitar but to metal, such as studded bracelets, Mjölnir pendants and more items that I don’t want to spoil right now. Each kind of item will have a different usage and duration, in order to allow players to have combos between effects, guitars and strings, making each run different. At the time, we’re aiming for a hundred different items ingame for the early access release.
The last gameplay aspect that I’ll talk about today are the bandmates. Like the items, players can find bandmates that will work like magic spells. Each time you get a bandmate he’s added to your band and can be used when the invocation bar is full. The bandmates will be drummers, bass players, singers, other guitarists and more. Each musician will have a different effect, so players can have a wide set of combinations. Also the slots for bandmates will be limited (the band cannot have two drummers!), so players will have to choose which combo works best for them.
There’s a lot more to talk about in terms of Metal Tales game design, and I’ll continue expanding it with more articles in this devblog. We welcome all kinds of feedback so feel free to leave a comment or send me an email at [email protected] so we can improve this game and devblog with your help.