Interviews// Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Developer Interview

You may well have noticed that a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game has just popped up on the shelves of your local game shop. SPOnG quizzed Nick Harper, the game’s creative director over at Ubisoft recently, and this is what he had to tell us.


SPOnG: Many fans remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the comics and the original TV series, with recent cartoon shows not being, well, great. Is the movie (and thus, the game) taking a leaf from recent cartoons or the comics and animation from the late 1980s?

Nick Harper: I think the movie is trying to be a relaunch of the franchise. When we talked with Mirage (the license holders) about their plans for the movie we really came away with that impression – they wanted to go back to the roots of the original Eastman and Laird comic, so the turtles were leaner and more sinewy, the environment was darker and so on. So yes, because we’re making the game of the movie it’s gone the same route.


SPOnG: As you can take the role as each of the four turtles, in what ways does play differ?

Nick Harper: There’s three main ways – firstly in acrobatics each turtle has his own signature move. We tried to encapsulate the personality of the brothers, so for example as Raph is the aggressive straight-talker his move is to punch holes into walls enabling him to scale up them. Leo, on the other hand is much more calm and Zen Master-like so his move puts him in a transcendental state where he can pass through solid objects. Sort of!

Within combat each turtle has his own fighting style – Mikey is the melee fighter and a flamboyant character so we used breakdance moves as our inspiration for him – useful for quick close-up attacks. Donatello on the other hand has the benefit of his bo staff so he can use long sweeping attacks to hit enemies at a distance. Finally, when the brothers are available together you can perform co-op attacks where two brothers do a special, powerful move, that’s again linked to the personality of the triggering turtle.


SPOnG: You mention co-operative play, is that multiplayer?

Nick Harper: When we took on the decision to follow the movie closely it unfortunately meant we wouldn’t be able to accommodate mutiplayer co-op. We wanted the player to feel the loss or gain of the family, but if we let the player team up with a friend during that time it would take away that feeling


SPOnG: So how closely does the game follow the story of the silver screen release?

Nick Harper: Well we received the script for the movie about a year ago and so we based the game off the values we extracted from that script – mostly about family and separation and the antagonistic relationship between the brothers. I think those values are still true in the movie but for sure some scenes were rewritten or edited or chopped about. So if you play the game and watch the movie the plots are the same in both but in the game we create the same feeling in a very different way. For example, in the movie they may show a scene where one brother is really missing the other brother. Well that’s all narrative of course, so it’s not so interesting for a game. Instead we create a situation where the player is working with his brother and then through the player’s actions that brother is taken out of the equation. Then, when the player reaches a similar situation to one they just experienced, they have no brother to help them and so they should, in theory, miss them. So it’s a different way of doing things but it gets the same message across.


SPOnG: Did you work with the film studios at all to keep the game as close as possible to the movie?

Nick Harper: Yeah we had the script early on and we met with Kevin Munroe, the director at Imagi studios in Hong Kong. We opened up a channel between Montreal and HK so all the art assests could be shared, and when we were in Hong Kong we talked with Imagi’s animation team to understand the feeling they were trying to achieve with the turtle movement. So it was a pretty close elaboration I think, which worked really well for us.


SPOnG: How long is the game, in terms of stages and features?

Nick Harper: When we play tested the game, many kids took from 12-15 hours to get through it. We have an unlock system in the game, whereby if you score an A or higher on a mission you unlock a challenge map. They’re short and easy to complete but the challenge is in getting the three gold shells – which could take some time. So all in all I think we have quite a bit of content between the actual game and challenge maps.


SPOnG: How do the mechanics of the gameplay work?

Nick Harper: I’d say it’s all-out action, really. When I thought about the game at the start I tried to imagine what it was like to be a ninja turtle, and I saw them leaping across the rooftops rapidly, not taking a break, and then landing in an area to fight some bad dudes before rushing off again. So in the game system I really wanted to push for that sense of urgency in the player. I describe it in a similar way to that buzzer game – where you pass a metal hoop along a wire without touching the edges. I wanted the player to feel the excitement build up of getting near the end of the wire but balanced with the tension of knowing they may hit the wire and then fail. So in the game we’re encouraging the player to string combos together as fast as they can without slipping up.