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When we first met with Paul and Ian from Mode7 and discussed FSP, we came away with a pretty clear philosophy of what needed to happen for FSP as a game and as a studio.

As a game, Synapse as it stood had enough quality in the core game to build on, and our job was to take a heavily menued, super core game and make it sympathetic to a console audience. In practice, we realised during development that we needed to redefine our design pillars for FSP, start from the ground up and repurpose where we could. No one on the team wanted to do a straight port, this was going to be something different.

As a studio, (as most devs already know) you're usually remembered for the last thing you did. At the time, we were coming off the back of LittleBigPlanet PS Vita and this was complete departure creatively. Reputation is everything; with the people that play our games and of course Mode7 entrusting us with their baby.

Prime represented a lot of firsts for us, many of which are the subject of other discussions; however, in 2012 it became our first self-published and self-financed project. Based on our initial estimates the original release date should have been February 2013. We released it on PlayStation Vita in September this year, just about tripling our original budget. "It’s not ready yet” was a common phrase throughout development. As gameplay and control improvements in core areas kept getting better, they highlighted weaker components in the game that we were happy with a few weeks back. Having the time to iterate and prototype was absolutely key on FSP, constantly challenging our own opinions on what felt intuitive.

To help finance it we took on other projects. We also had this thought kicking around that if Sony and Mode7 trusted us with what is most precious to them, the logic was pretty simple - who else would do the same, and could we build a sustainable business from it. The answer to that I suppose is how we grew from a Sony exclusive studio to a fairly niche developer and publisher and is a story for another day.



Designing our version of Synapse

- Gareth Wright, Design Manager, @Gaz_Wright

Mode7 had created something really special with their original title, nailing addictive gameplay, depth-of-strategy, and empowering players to out-think one another.

We all asked, “How can we maintain everything that was great about the original on PC, and bring it to a new, social audience on Vita? An audience who demand immediacy, intuitive controls, wrapped in a more visually impressive package.”

Bringing the game over to Vita was no easy feat, but the vast amount of challenge was not on the technological side as originally perceived, but one of design and gameplay. Getting to grips with the huge amount of depth under the surface quickly made clear why the game was so popular on PC. Gameplay over visuals was absolutely at the heart of Frozen Synapse, and that gameplay married so well with the luxury of a big screen and the speed of a mouse.

The size and portable nature of the Vita presented a number of design and gameplay challenges from the get go, but also unique opportunities with touch, to design to the platform’s strengths. With Vita we also saw an opportunity to break the mould a bit – create something that does embrace all the pick-up-and-play expectations, but could also re-imagine the strategy genre for the modern generation of Vita gamer - No mathematics or dice-rolls determining the outcomes of a fire-fight, instead total player control over what transpires.

In FSP, much like Chess, understanding the goals and the strengths of your playing pieces (units) is very simple. The strategy in each turn and the “it’s never the same game” feeling, comes with the control and freedom we can give to the player. Once that’s nailed, it’s completely down to the player’s tactical creativity.

To ensure longevity and keep the game fun and flowing, the real key for us was to ensure that the commands (creating paths to walk along or orders on where to aim for example), were easy to apply and adjust. All FSP players have their own tactics for any given scenario, and all wanted to be able move the camera, select units, create paths, apply commands or preview whether their plan would work… at any given time, and often simultaneously.

Our main design challenge on Vita was to try to empower players with that sense of freedom, make turn planning quick and easy, second-nature, and thus see the mind-games and deviousness between players rise to the top.

Through numerous focus-testing sessions, we noticed that players who knew where they wanted to place a waypoint or command, that using the cursor and control sticks could feel sluggish. Especially those used to a mouse-pointer in the original. If anything we wanted to speed up turn time and laying down plans for the Vita audience, so a lack of touch controls just wasn’t going to fly.

At first we were geared up to allow the player to pan and zoom the camera with touch, and that would be it. However, deciding to implement touch to mimic all actions mapped to Cross (selecting stuff and adding commands) made a massive difference in laying down simple and effective plans for the player’s squads.