In most turn-based games you see the consequence of your decisions pretty quickly. You give the order to attack; bullets fly. Frozen Synapse delays that gratification, asking you to wait until you’ve given orders to each of your squad of vat-grown sci-fi soldiers before showing the results, because those results play out simultaneously with your opponent’s—a machinegunner rounds a corner and is surprised by a shotgun blast while a grenadier ducks behind cover before a sniper can line up his shot, and a rocket harmlessly demolishes a wall several seconds after everyone behind it has buggered off.
What prevents all that action from being confusing is that it all plays out in abstract neon shapes. Everything in Frozen Synapse is seen through “the shape”, a digital overlay that clings to the future city of Markov Geist like a pair of yoga pants, making it readable at a glance.
Frozen Synapse was released by Mode 7 in 2011, and its success surprised creators Ian Hardingham and Paul Kilduff-Taylor. While many multiplayer-focused indie games languish, unable to attract or maintain the critical mass of players needed to make finding a match hassle-free, Frozen Synapse’s design makes it easy to have multiple games going at once, taking turns and then being alerted when one of your opponents had done the same. Plus, lag isn’t an issue. You can still find a game today.
Five years later, Hardingham and Kilduff-Taylor think it’s time for a sequel. They’ve been working on it since June of last year,
recently announcing it with a screenshot and the words “Open World Tactics” and “Coming 2016”.
Towers of commerce and faith
So why are these factions fighting? There’s a mysterious external force making incursions into Markov Geist to uncover valuable long-lost artifacts, and the city’s cults and gangs are competing for them as well. An alert on the city screen will warn you of each incursion and it’s up to you how to respond.
While Mode 7 says that knowing the story of the first game isn’t necessary, Frozen Synapse 2 is set after it, with its citizens attempting to rebuild and forge new alliances. “Because you have these generated cities each time it’s gonna be a different version, a different hypothetical city,” says Kilduff-Taylor. “This is about the idea of the city as a very complex compromise between different ideologies. Each faction will have its own ideology, they will relate to the incursion force in a different way. Some of them might want to enslave it and use it for their own goal, some of them might want to research it, some of them might want to ally with it and have it take over the city.”
He cites Darran Anderson’s book
Imaginary Cities as an inspiration, “He talks a lot about cities as being reflective of ideologies and I though that was a really interesting idea, this idea of towers of commerce and faith, that buildings represent different points of an ideology and they’re all trying to reach towards competing goals. It was an idea that I wanted in Frozen Synapse 1 but we had to convey that with linear missions, whereas here we can have a real living city with these real personalities all competing,”
Beyond the complicated warring belief systems, there are elements you might associate with a more typical open world game. Hardingham gives an example: “You can go and piss off faction A, you can take the weird church and go attack one of their temples and see what happens. They’re probably gonna attack you, they’re gonna ask their friends to attack you. All that stuff you’re completely free to do at any time.”
As Kilduff-Taylor puts it, you can either choose which factions to side with to push for a specific endgame, or “you can also decide to be nonsense and to prat around as well. It’s important to me that we manage to find a way of having a really strong story without railroading how the player feels they should play at all.”
As for the player, they’ll be in charge of a small group who have been sent into the city to deal with the situation however they prefer. “We want you to have an open remit,” Hardingham says. “You’re there to find out what’s going on with this incursion force and why it’s coming in and attacking the city, and to manage everything to create some kind of power balance or establish some kind of order. It’s up to you to define what order that is.”
On multiplayer and sneakiness
The first screenshot of Frozen Synapse 2 revealed details that weren’t present in the original game. There’s more variety to the objects that can be used as cover, including a car and trees outside the building, and what looks like a toilet inside it. (
Obviously video game toilets are Very Important.) Separating the inside and outside is a wall with a curved section, something else the first Frozen Synapse did without. It may seem a slight change, but it’s an illuminating one.
But as nice as the campaign’s procedurally generated city sounds, it won’t be a feature of the multiplayer mode. “It’s just too big a challenge to do at this stage,” explains Hardingham. “I think the primary thing for multiplayer above all else is probably the new units. In singleplayer we have all these new units and we also have stats, basically it’s based around signing mercenaries that are a kind of FS archetype but will have different stats and different perks. In multiplayer we expand on the original roster of six different kinds of units with another seven or eight units that we spent a lot of time designing.”
Those units aren’t just new varieties of gun. They’re designed to interact with another new feature: stealth. Both singleplayer and multiplayer will allow units to sneak into position before everything kicks off. “Being unseen and sneaking around is a huge part of it,” Kilduff-Taylor says, “and if the AI spots you then units will go to defensive positions and others will come round and attack you and try and flush you out. We’ve got some new units that are relevant to that kind of gameplay.”
They’re tight-lipped about most of those new units, but Hardingham mentions one favorite, “a smoke grenade launcher, which is really nice because it allows you to create a dynamic bit of terrain, in some ways a short-term bit of terrain, so I hope that gives the idea of the kind of thing that we’re talking about. Any new unit has to fit in perfectly with the really hardcore mechanics of FS, and what’s FS all about? It’s about sight and prediction and preparedness and being able to plan really cool, complicated stuff.”
Another new feature that will particularly change the multiplayer is what they’re calling “advanced tactics”, a new set of orders that can be programmed into troops to tell them how to react to changing events as they occur: “if X happens, switch to plan Y.” That’s a big change, but smaller ones are in the works as well. “We’re just trying to deal with a few of the problems people have with the first game,” says Hardingham. “We had a problem with people abandoning games, we’re gonna be working really hard to fix that. There was a specific ploy in multiplayer called the distraction ploy¹ that I’m not a particular fan of, we’re getting rid of that.”
Interface/off
Frozen Synapse has a tricky interface to come to terms with, and it takes a while to realize how to get the most out of it. It’s easy enough double-clicking to set waypoints but when it comes to telling a soldier to glance in one direction while walking in another, or ignore a close enemy to focus on a distant one, things got trickier. “We had an additional feature in the first game where you could define a zone and then ignore it or do other things related to it,” Kilduff-Taylor says. “The interface for that was quite poor so we’re going to make a good interface for zones.”
Rather than drastically rethinking the interface as a whole, they’d rather come up with better ways to teach it. “What we have to do is try and understand what a new player experience is like for this kind of game and really, really make an effort to improve that as much as we humanly can,” Kilduff-Taylor explains. “It’s about giving people a very very powerful toolset. If you look at any software that does that, music software, video editing software, that kind of thing, the UI always has a steep learning curve at the start. There really is no way round that.”
"It’s about giving people a very very powerful toolset."
He goes on to praise his colleague’s work on the campaign map interface. “If you just want to be supplied missions, you just want to click through and do the missions, you can definitely do that. If you want to get into micromanaging which road your squad takes or exactly which address you’re gonna go to on the way, do everything manually, you’ll be able to do all that as well. We’ve been playing around with this a bit and I really really like how he’s designed that system. A lot of that came out of some of the work we did later on with Frozen Cortex, with doing a complex management simulation, making that accessible and immediate.”
Frozen Cortex was Mode 7’s future football game, a kind of Tron Blood Bowl. There’s an overlap between football and strategy games, not just that you’re controlling a team of specialists, but managing their changing abilities in the downtime. While they acknowledge the urban warfare of X-COM: Apocalypse as an influence, NFL Head Coach also comes up. “That was the first sports game I saw that really nudged you along and helped you during the off-season know when it was the right time to be deciding to cut your punter,” Hardingham explains. “People want this deep simulation that they’re interacting with, but they don’t want to feel like they’re doing the wrong thing and they’re gonna lose a 20-hour playthrough because they don’t know what they’re doing. Balancing that is hard.”
Now entering the conclusion phase
One final detail of interest to Frozen Synapse fans: Kilduff-Taylor is composing the music again. Frozen Synapse’s soundtrack is one of its most-praised elements, shifting from the pummeling electronic beats and synthesized strings of an action movie to an ethereal voice like a machine intelligence echoing through a glass skyscraper. Kilduff-Taylor receives messages from new fans discovering his music to this day, and he’s so excited to be working in this style again he’s completed the sequel’s soundtrack already. “I think it’s the best work I’ve done and I just got the masters back yesterday and it all sounded great. I can’t wait to play it to people.”
Mode 7 played a live demo of Frozen Synapse 2 on stage at the
PC Gamer Weekender earlier this month. Kilduff-Taylor says it’s earlier than they would normally show their work, but they’re too excited to hold back. “We’ve talked up this procedurally generated city but it’s real. We’re playing with it right now. It has gameplay. You can do this thing where you zoom down into the city and play a tactical encounter. There’ve been so many instances of people trying to aim really high with this stuff but not necessarily having the foundation of the gameplay, and we want to get on the stage and go look, this works, right now! And it only crashes occasionally!”
“Our real target at the moment is to work really hard on delivering the kind of beta early access launch that we’re known for,” Hardingham says, explaining they will definitely release in 2016. “That’s absolutely something that’s going to happen. The most important thing for us is getting the game into a really solid early access release.”
Five years on, Frozen Synapse’s simultaneous turns are still unusual. There have been plenty of other games about small-squad tactics, but none have approached the genre in the same way. “I have a combative design philosophy where I’m taking a bunch of things that I don’t like in games and trying to do the complete opposite,” says Hardingham. “For how popular FS is, it is a bit surprising that it’s still so unique, but we definitely feel that it is. FS2 needs to be as unique again.”
¹
The distraction ploy allows you to defeat a single enemy in a better position by using one of your troops as, well, a distraction. Move the first unit into the open for a second, then back into cover while moving the second unit out. The enemy wastes a precious instant targeting the first unit and is unable to refocus on the second until it’s too late. The designers dislike it both for being against the principles of the game, and for being fiddly to pull off. It works, but it’s no fun.