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Happy New Year everyone! And what better way to start another inglorious 12 month journey to the next Christmas than one of my favorite dark fantasy storybook extravaganzas, The spirit of a fairy taleis gaining a following.
The novelty of this news is in question, it cannot be denied. Developer Lionel “Seith” Galt and his team have been working on a crowded mousetrap since 2022. But this is the first time they’ve actually blogged about it, sharing screens for Unreal Engine 5 and two new updates. They still haven’t made an obvious statement about improving the title, but perhaps a title as humorous as “Ghost Of A Tail” is beyond the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5’s trumpet.
If you haven’t had the fun, Ghost Of A Tale is a full game set in Undead Parish. Dark soulsUnless it’s the type that’s also set in Redwall. You are an imprisoned mouse minstrel, Tylo, who must escape a giant cliff fortress full of gangly rat guards. Along the way, you’ll rob spider nests, meet eccentric alchemists, practice songs with rat lords, wear some fancy dress, and reveal some incredibly well-thought-out species prejudices in a legendary battle against an apocalyptic green flame.
There’s a brilliant cast of anthropomorphic animals with witty character portraits, some absurd good looks, messy environments and a fair amount of fun writing. Theft kind of appeals, mind you, but it’s not something you’ll forgive when you’re tasked with identifying mushrooms in a sunny yard using a parchment fungi pedia. Redwall and Dark Souls aside, the game’s other inspirations include The Secret of NIMH, Echo (perhaps a more natural comparison here than a software output), The Dark Crystal, and Zelda. In John Walker (RPS in peace) the words “love” and “beautiful” appear no fewer than eight times. Evaluation From 2018
The first game ran in Unity, and that’s the engine they used for the sequel at launch. Seith – a former DreamWorks animator – and his collaborators developed a new in-house tool for questions and dialogue – “the old off-the-shelf tool was little more than a glorified text editor”.
The game was in development for “a couple of years” before the team confirmed that Unity wasn’t cutting the mustard. “Instead of creating gameplay systems and assets, we spent more time fighting the engine.” He writes in a blog post. So after talking with designer Paul Gardner and programmer Cyril Polhiak, he decided to switch to Unreal Engine 5, even though he didn’t like “the previous 4.x iterations”.
Switching to a different game engine mid-production “never happens in the industry because the consequences are too difficult to contemplate,” Seit said in a blog post. “Going through a storm of typically unpleasant meetings, convincing studio executives, looking producers and investors in the eye and saying, ‘We’ve got to rip out those last two years of development and start from scratch.'”
“Thankfully in our case it proved that Paul and Cyril were willing to trust me and bite the bullet,” he continued. “Still, Cyril was doing a lot of back-end plumbing like data management, loading systems, and authoring tools, and he’s going to take everything he knows and has done in C# and move to C++. Not an easy prospect, by any stretch of the imagination.”
Gardner, for his part, “had to go back to the early stages of testing and re-engage in the initial development of a new dialogue and quest system, complicated with the game design” but thanks to the investment in the tools for dialogue and missions themselves, the change in the game engine means that the nature of Paul’s writing work will not be affected much.
The reboot gave Seit and his collaborators a chance to “refocus on the game’s strengths and essence, which we probably wouldn’t have done had we continued to plow ahead as originally planned.”
The switch to Unreal Engine 5 involved a year and a half of “lost” development time, Seith concluded, “but I’m happy to say today that all the time, pain and money was well worth it. We’re at a level we couldn’t reach with the previous engine.” Like rats squealing on parapets, you can judge the results yourself with creatively filled script visualizations.
I gave Ghost Of A Tail Say a lot of love over the years, though like many games I love, I’m not sure I’ve written anything that measures up to my enthusiasm. It was the first and only game my partner saw me play from intro to credits. What I’d like from the sequel: Make the looting a more organic part of the exploration and questing, and less of the annoying capital-S system (with the grungy encounter music) you have to cheer on the way to the cool item. Do cleverer things with disguises, too. And give me a more elaborate mushroom picking quest. I wouldn’t mind if the whole experience was about forage.
