Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones

Nintendo of Europe: Please introduce yourselves and your roles on the team.

Rob Clarke: My name’s Rob Clarke. I’ve been with Curve Studios for two years, and I’m the marketing and PR guy there.

Sam Robinson: I’m Sam Robinson, and I’m the lead level designer on Stealth Inc 2. I also was responsible for the sound effects and music direction.

NoE: Can you give us a general description of Stealth Inc 2 for someone who’s never heard of it before?

RC: I think the first thing we’d probably say is that Stealth Inc 2 has a “2” on the end, which is going to confuse a lot of people: “Oh, it’s a sequel to a game I haven’t played before.” But actually it’s more like a complete reimagining of the first game.

SR: So it’s a stealth puzzle-platform game. You’re a clone “born” in a cloning lab in PTI Resolutions, which is a massive company that tests children’s toys. It sounds really cute and lovely, because the toys they make are for kids, but the way they go about testing the toys is really sick and depraved – they create these expendable clones to test them.

RC: We’re really big fans of stealth games like the Metal Gear Solid series, where you have this awesome moment where you’re hidden in a shadow you spent ten minutes setting up, and you’re walking behind people and being really stealthy, and then suddenly someone turns around and you say, “Ah.” And then you spend the next five minutes trying to find somewhere safe to go, with alarms going off, and you just feel like an idiot. So what we wanted to do was get rid of that part, so the moment you’re discovered, a laser or an enemy will just shoot you and you just explode.

NoE: No escape!

RC: Right, which is the benefit of being a clone: you can be instantly remade. And the other tenet of the game is that yes it’s stealthy, and yes you’ll die if you’re not careful, but you’re instantly back in the game again. I think it’s about half a second before you can move again, so you’re never more than one small section or puzzle away.

SR: In the last game, it was just a linear progression of test chambers. Level one, level two, level three, all the way to the 80th test. We noticed that it was difficult for players to go through this, because it’s such a mental grind. Every level was a puzzle, and it was exhausting. You become fatigued! It could wear you down and you’d become frustrated, and that obviously wasn’t the intention. That’s not what we want for the player. So we’ve now added this exploratory overworld as breather space. It’s a lot easier to explore in this place, and a lot less demanding of the player.

NoE: So now you’ve got more freedom.

RC: Yeah, there’s a lot more freedom. There’s a lot of failure and a lot of experimentation going on, and the puzzles are very tense; the test chambers themselves are probably one to three minutes long, if you know what to do. If you don’t, if you’re more like me, then probably 20 minutes is more like it!

SR: It’s a lot more fun now. You get to explore and do your own thing, you’re under no pressure. So yes, it’s completely open, there’s loads more exploration, and as the game progresses, you unlock new gadgets, new toys. There’s a whole toy line throughout this game that the company is testing. Every time you complete a chapter, you unlock a new gadget, and that gives you more freedom and the ability to explore the world. All these gadgets give you more freedom, and you’re constantly revisiting areas and opening up new passages.

NoE: Where did the ideas for the gadgets come from?

SR: We wanted to create some new stealth gadgets basically, so when we were coming up with the concepts, they were all things you’d see in everyday stealth games: grappling hooks, camouflage suits, that kind of thing. We felt it was too clichéd and not original enough, so we moved away from those, scrapped all those ideas, and came up with all-new toys that you hopefully haven’t seen before!

Every object that we create in the game has multiple mechanics. It has to have at least a dual use, and that’s how we create rich puzzles. It really messes with the player, and we make them think about what the applications of each gadget are.

NoE: How would you pitch the game’s difficulty level, then? Is it something that’s approachable for new players as well as those who perhaps played the previous game?

SR: I would say that Stealth Inc 2 is a lot more approachable that the previous game and I would actually recommend it as an entry point. It sounds strange, but the sequel addresses a lot of the problems that the first game had in terms of difficulty curve.

RC: It starts very slowly, and the first level… well, I say it starts slowly, but the first level is actually you trying to escape from a load of moving walls and stuff! But it’s all very obvious, and you’re basically just moving left and right and jumping. And the game gets bigger by introducing different pieces of equipment.

The clone himself doesn’t actually get any new moves; he stays as he is, and you get new equipment as you play through. We’ve worked really hard to make sure that the pacing makes sense: in the first few levels you’ll just be avoiding cameras, and then you’ll get the first piece of equipment, and then a second piece, in the space of a few hours, so you get a long time to get used to it.

NoE: Stealth Inc 2 is exclusive to Wii U, so how does the game make use of the console?

RC: We worked a lot with Nintendo before on the Hydroventure games, so we had a lot of experience working with Nintendo hardware already, but we hadn’t got our hands on Wii U. The first thing we do whenever we get our hands on any hardware is we ask ourselves, “How can we use it? Does it make sense? How will it be fun for people?” With Wii U, obviously it’s got the Wii U GamePad, and that’s the natural way to go. You can play the game off-TV if you want to, but also the entire game is playable in co-op through the GamePad.

SR: Right. So in co-op, one player uses a Wii Remote and Nunchuk or a Wii U Pro Controller, while the second player uses the Wii U GamePad. The second player has a host of gadgets that they can use to protect the player, like an anti-light, which creates the opposite of light: a shadow around the player. They can draw on the screen like a whiteboard and direct the player around. They have to help the player hack terminals – you have to hack a terminal to get to the exit. So we split the responsibility that the player usually has between two players. There are loads of other benefits and challenges involved with co-op as well though. The main player can hack and take over enemies with a gadget called the Jackboy, and then the second player actually takes independent control of that enemy. It’s really funny because the enemy robots can be quite dangerous, and so it can easily end in calamity if your co-op partner messes up!

RC: One of the very first things we did was let you use the GamePad to draw on the screen, because we watched people playing puzzle games, and even single-player puzzle games tend to be co-operative in the sense that you can sit with your friends or partner and say, “Go over here, try that, what are you doing?” And so in Stealth Inc 2, instantly you can draw a circle and a big arrow on the GamePad and say, “There!” That’s a really simple thing, but it changes the dynamic of co-op completely.

NoE: It really integrates that second player.

RC: It gets you really into it. As you go through the game, the co-op player becomes much, much more important. There’s a gadget you can unlock in the game where the main player gets an ability to create a clone of their clone, so you have two clones, and the GamePad player can then become and control that clone, and that works all the way through the game. You’ll have different equipment, and all of that equipment can be used by that second player.

NoE: That means you have two completely different experiences; whether you’re on your own, or you’re with someone.

RC: We’ve watched our guys play through in single-player and we’ve watched them play in co-op, and it is very different if you’re playing from the start like that. It just makes it feel like you’re really there without having the second player on the screen all the time; that’s the obvious way to go with co-op, but it doesn’t work with a puzzle platform game.

NoE: Designing for both single-player and co-operative play must have been quite a challenge.

SR: It was, it was a huge challenge. It was just a lot of trial and error to see what we could get away with. When you create another clone, they both control with the same analogue stick, so they both do the same movements, right? But in co-op mode they’re controlled independently, so we weren’t sure if that was going to break every puzzle that we’d made. But it didn’t – it just worked! It was a lot of trial and error and making it work.

NoE: Is the game integrated with Miiverse in any way?

SR: Yes, it is. People can leave hints and tips and clues around levels, so if you’re in a particularly hard puzzle, someone may have left a Miiverse hint explaining what to do, or commented on joke we’ve put in there, that kind of thing. They’re little glowing icons that appear in levels. You can choose to access them, so they won’t spoil your game if you don’t want to touch them.

RC: There’s also the level editor, which is 100% complete in the sense that you’ve got access to the same tools and logic that the game designers had. It’s actually really easy to use; the controls are really simple, using the GamePad to move stuff around, place objects, and then you can upload your levels online as well, and they all get downloaded too. All the levels are completely shared and will always be available in the game, so that’s a really great way of being able to extend the life of the game. We’ve seen with level editors in our previous games, you’ll get maybe four or five hundred levels, and some of them are better than ours! Actually, we brought on a level designer because of the work they’d done with the level editor in one of our previous games.

SR: It’s weird: it’s so easy to make a hard level, but making the easy levels, especially at the beginning of the game, creating a nice, smooth difficulty curve, is quite challenging. It’s all about visual communication and easing the player in, teaching the player and ensuring that they’ve really learnt what you want them to learn so that they can carry on and progress through the game. So there are going to be tons of hard levels on the community maps!

NoE: Thank you both very much for your time!