THE MAKING OF TUNIC

A game made in the margins

- ALEX SPENCER

Sitting down with Andrew Shouldice, fresh off the back of a double BAFTA win, conversation immediately wanders away from the topic of how this award-winning game was made, and onto the question of notebooks. Shouldice leans over the table to admire ours, a little black Moleskine affair, and it’s only after a good few minutes on the relative benefits of stitched versus ringbound that we actually get back to the point at hand. An unexpected tangent, certainly – but one that, as it turns out, speaks to the important role such apparatus played in Tunic’s development.

This shouldn’t, perhaps, come as a surprise. After all, Tunic makes clear Shouldice’s fondness for good old-fashioned paper and ink through its in-game instruction manual. Loaded with beautifully illustrated maps, with hints written in a glyph cipher and biro annotations left by some unseen hand, it feels like a gentle suggestion that you might want to keep your own notetaking equipment to hand, in order to track the game’s many secrets, and perhaps even dabble in a little translation if you choose.

Catching up again with Shouldice, now back home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he produces the notebook that contains the very first inklings of this game, and tells us it dates back to 2010 – five years before Tunic’s development began. Not that players would necessarily recognise its contents, he explains: “It’s got notes for games that did not end up becoming Tunic. Stuff like, ‘What if it was a pixel game where you’re just a little guy who’s, like, seven pixels tall?’”