The Ninja Theory team on Hellblade, and how they’re reinventing the way they make games. By Samuel Roberts
Ninja Theory is motion-capturing the cutscenes for Hellblade in its boardroom. I feel this is worth pointing out because I’ve never even heard of it being done before.
This DIY method of creating something that’s usually professionally outsourced is Hellblade all over. Ninja Theory wants to make a third-person actionadventure that’s as accomplished as its previous games without getting a publisher to pay for it.
Just north of 100 people work at the studio right now. On one side of the Cambridge business park office, the vast majority the staff – around 60 of them – have been working on the Marvel-powered Disney Infinity 2.0. The little superhero toys are everywhere. On the other, quieter side of the building, a skilled group of Ninja Theory veterans – around 12-13 staff and never likely to rise above 15 – are completely reworking the way the games studio has traditionally functioned, in order to make Hellblade.
Hellblade will be the first game that Ninja Theory truly owns. Motion-capturing in their main meeting room is just one way chief creative officer Tameem Antoniades and company are exploring more economic methods to achieve more ambitious results.
“I think given that we have only one of everyone on the team, we have to work from a different angle,” he tells me. “What are the limits of the team we have? And what can we create within those limits? We could’ve created a game like Enslaved or DmC and mapped out all the levels and then gone about building them, but I know that on those teams we had six level designers or half a dozen if not a dozen environment artists and animators and effects people. So it takes something like 20-30 people to make the environments of our previous games, and we’ve got one person doing that on this game, so if we did it the old way – the standard way – you wouldn’t have much of a game there at all. So, let’s think more about the challenge.”
Hellblade is a quintessential Ninja Theory project, a third-person adventure with a bedrock of thirdperson hack-and-slash combat. It’s set in Helheim of Norse mythology. Players take the role of Senua, a character built out of the recent (well, 2002) discovery of a Celtic goddess known as Senuna. Antoniades drew upon the Viking invasion of Orkney in Scotland as inspiration for the game’s Viking enemy. The combat system is targeting DmC’s responsiveness, but with a beat-’em-up’s approach to player expression (less combos, more skill required).
“We wanted to do a melee game, a sword-based game, and so for that you need an excuse not to have guns,” Antoniades explains. “Setting it in a time where there were no guns is the best way to do that. And we didn’t really want to do another Asian-themed game like Heavenly Sword, so I was kind of searching for a setting, and I thought Celtic Britain wasn’t a subject I see a lot of in games. The only thing I knew about is Boadicea, and sort of Braveheart, which is a grossly confused and inaccurate representation of what the Scottish Celts were like... I investigated Celtic culture a bit more, and I came across an article on the BBC where they’d found a new goddess called Senuna... but it was reported as Senua. And it was interesting, because there was no real information about who this person was and there will never be information about who that person was. It’s sad we’ll never know, but I thought there’s enough room here to create a new mythos.”
I’d categorise all of Ninja Theory’s games – PlayStation 3 exclusive Heavenly Sword, Andy Serkis-led adaptation Enslaved and Devil May Cry reboot DmC – as good to great. I think they exhibit a clear arc of rising standards in terms of what the team can do, especially in art direction and combat design. Ninja Theory is a studio big enough to make a linear action game, but not large enough to create an Assassin’s Creed. Disney Infinity 2.0, I suspect, pays the bills, and taps into the studio’s rare expertise with satisfying and complex combat. Hellblade, I believe, will belong alongside DmC and its ilk in that canon of refined action games, but this project will also expand Ninja Theory’s remit substantially – mainly because the development demands it.
Ninja Theory’s plan isn’t just to build a microcosm of its previous games and sell it for £15 – it’s to make a game of near equivalent value to DmC: Devil May Cry on a smaller budget. Whereas in the past, development of combat systems, art direction and environmental design would be a staggered process, on Hellblade everything is being created in tandem. Without the luxury of time, exploration suddenly becomes very important. It’s the one system you can build around while combat is coming together.
Helheim’s entire basic landmass has been mapped in Unreal Engine 4 and it looks impressive. I like this approach to world-building. From a bird’s-eye view the game’s circular logo is visibly imprinted onto the map and forms the shape of the world itself, which is composed of archipelagos, high cliffs and beaches. From almost anywhere on the map, you can see an enormous structure at the centre, a tower built to resemble a Viking warship, and from heightened regions I can see the grooves of the logo built into the land. These lines form beaches in one part of the map, a marsh with a boat graveyard towards the northeast, and a dark mountain tunnel where the team plans to have disembodied hands reaching out at Senua. Already it feels like there’s a coherent world being created. I like that it’s in a professional state when the rest of the game is still being figured out. Veteran art director Stuart Adcock shows me a whole board of work-in-progress map designs that the team made, all with those symbols (which you can see the outline of in the image below) embedded into the landscape.
To build a world of this size, the art team is creating assets that can be reused – 95% reused is the target. I’m shown how a tower can be constructed from one set of building blocks, how details can be recycled and resized, and how individual detail assets can add character on top of these basic blocks. I’m shown one entire area that was quickly put together in one morning, a temple area with arches and puddles dropped around, and there is a nice sense of place just to this. Nothing seems bespoke. The aim is to only use three rigs for enemy character models. I’m shown how much mileage they can get out of even the most basic undead Viking characters by adding a helmet or a weapon, increasing size or by removing chunks of flesh to show bone. They demonstrate to me the importance of silhouette in creating the impression of variety among Senua’s foes. I suspect the legions of individual Uruk-hai in Shadow of Mordor, no two of them quite alike, were created using similar mix and match techniques. You lose nothing doing it – I can see more and more developers following suit.
In Hellblade’s art direction features a noticeably washed out colour palette and a leaning towards horror. The enemies are being created in tandem by the game’s one senior character artist, Claire Blustin, who has worked at Ninja Theory for eleven years. “This isn’t quite procedural generation, but it’s somewhere in between how we used to do things and procedural generation,” Antoniades tells me.
The character and environmental design is coming along nicely, Antoniades has locked himself in a room to finish the story, and progress is definitely being made on the combat system, too. It’s the second week of December 2014, and the aim is to get the basic combo figured out by Christmas. When I give Hellblade a tryout in a test arena it plays like they’re basically there.
There’s a weighty feel to the normal three-hit attack and to the slower heavy, and the way the camera is intentionally pulled should make fights feel more like oneon-one, high stakes affairs than DmC. Ninja Theory is still looking at potential inspiration, however: I mention Chris Thursten favourite Blade Symphony and the studio’s project development manager, Dominic Matthews, makes a note. Promising groundwork is being laid here. Unlike DmC and its bevy of upgrade systems, Hellblade’s combat abilities will be mostly unlocked from the start.
“We learnt a lot from Capcom,” Antoniades says. “Having worked closely with them for two years, they gave us lots of advice on their philosophy, so we’re taking a lot of that forward. Key to that is responsiveness, obviously. We focused, in previous games like Heavenly Sword, on animation realism, making sure footsteps felt right... On DmC, there was none of that, it was just snapping – it was just snapping from move to move and that’s what we were told we had to do, and we didn’t get any negative feedback from that. In fact, it was quite the opposite.”
Antoniades wants to tap into the self-expression offered by one-on-one fighting games, too. “If you can think of something to do, we should let you do it. That’s where creative expression comes from in playing the game.”
Everything else is still being figured out – I’m shown a prototype of an illusion-based puzzle, where there’s a broken bridge halting Senua’s progress. If the player can line up the camera so the broken parts appear as though they’re connected, when she returns to the bridge it will be fixed. There’s a bit of Arkham’s Riddler trophies to this that has a lot of potential uses.
Antoniades wants to make a choice-based story as well, even within the confines of the leaner budget. “In the past, our stories and levels have been linear because nothing more has been required from us,” he says. “Our cutscenes have been great but we’ve never explored interactive cutscenes or choice-based experiences – a publisher doesn’t necessarily want that. They want you to deliver the project and not take too many risks. You get a lot of resources and you solve problems with resources. This is totally the opposite. We have to create a new experience... otherwise what’s the point of being independent? The whole point of independent creativity is to create something that hasn’t been seen before. We know we’re good at combat, we know we can tell stories, but how do we tell stories within the world in a more open environment with more choices, in a way that hasn’t been told before? And incorporate combat into the mix in a way that feels like it’s part of the world, and not just a room encounter? This is the real challenge of the project. A lot of the other stuff is technical challenges and we’re dealing with that, and we’re pushing through it. But the creative challenge is very different.”
The PC is relatively new territory for Ninja Theory, but with this style of development, the ease of running open betas helps them solve a lot of the problems they couldn’t do with previous projects. “I think PC offers us a level of freedom that we haven’t had before. We’re looking at everything we do on this project and figuring out better ways of doing things compared to how the traditional console model works. And consoles are following suit with PC, but I think they’re about five years behind what things like Steam are doing. If we want to do an open beta right now, it’s a little bit trickier to do that than on PC... Playtesting is a huge thing for us. Usability testing, getting people hands-on to try things out, get feedback, then roll that back in and improve the game... it’s always been essential for us to do that. Not every publisher has let us, because of the secrecy that goes into consoles and publisherbased
businesses. As an independent we have the freedom to do that.”
Hellblade will support 4K resolution and maybe even mods, too. “I think we want to get to the point where we can invite players and fans to add to the game, and do things that are unexpected, and suggest ideas or add-ons that can make the game richer.”
I find the nature of Hellblade’s development inspiring. There’s something guerrilla-like about a small team of Ninja Theory’s most experienced staff breaking away from bigger projects to make something where any potential success belongs entirely to them. At the same time, I’m left with further concerns about the future of big games, and publishers’ narrowing desire to take risks.
“When your first criteria is you should have the potential to sell 3-5 million units,” Antoniades says, “several things come off the table completely, straight away. Something like a melee-focused game comes off the table because all publishers have stats that tell you you cannot sell melee combat into those numbers. Creating fantastical worlds that aren’t based on existing IP are pretty much off the table.”
If Hellblade will find an audience anywhere, it’s on PC where a £40 game from a major publisher has as much chance of succeeding as anything else. By Ninja Theory’s calculations, 300,000 sales of Hellblade will mean the company breaks even. A million sales could change the way the company makes games entirely.
The overriding impression I get from the creation of Hellblade is, if you can make a quality game using these methods, why not do it? If the traditional model of development is no longer so viable to risk-averse and now schedule-starved publishers, why not use that same expertise without burning as much money? Just because no one (to my knowledge) has cleared out the chairs and tables to mo-cap in their boardroom before, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Hellblade’s development is about finding more efficient ways to get the same results from a team of skilled veterans – I don’t doubt their passion, and I’d be curious to see if people who play Hellblade will even notice all the smoke and mirrors.
“I think this is partly because I was a programmer for five years, so I’m used to the idea that you build things in an object-oriented way,” Antoniades explains. “You build kit parts that you can reuse, and then you work out a system for building things, and then you build out of that. So what Dan, for example, on environments is in charge of doing, is figuring out the system. However good his system ends up will define how big a world we can create. However big the world ends up being will determine what the gameplay experience will be. The critical path in this project is the people on it, not the design. My experience is that the way we have done things in the past requires a lot of people, and if we’re to do it a different way, if we’re going to have any hope of achieving this game on the budget and resources we have, we have to think very hard and deeply about our approach. And it’s radically different, and it’s a bit unknown. But I know we have a chance with the methods we’re using. With the old methods we wouldn’t have a chance.”