THE MAKING OF...

How one of the UK indie scene’s leading lights cracked the case of the mystery game

By Jen Simpkins

Format iOS, PC, Switch 

Developer/publisher SFB Games 

Origin UK 

Release 2019

Our interest in delving into the making of Tangle Tower stems largely from one thing: the sheer luxuriousness of it. From the sumptuously drawn backgrounds to its snappy script, detailed animation, vibrant designs, rich soundtrack and award-winning vocal performances, everything in this murder mystery visual novel is presented immaculately. How has indie outfit SFB Games achieved it? One look at the folder of sketches and notes we receive, full to bursting with flowcharts, scribbles and iteration upon iteration of character designs gives us our answer. They probably didn’t need to do all this, we suggest, although that is exactly what makes the game so striking. “Scope?” technical director Tom Vian grins at us. “What’s scope?”

Tangle Tower is far from a large game: all of the action takes place within the single, titular building, and although you’re free to explore the place and talk to suspects at your leisure, the story is a linear affair wrapped up in just five or six hours. But the attention to detail is lavishly applied, with all dialogue fully voiced, and each character responding with their own unique thoughts when presented with evidence – feats even beyond the reach of the Ace Attorney games. The secret was not as dramatic as mortgaging houses or surviving on cheap cuts of meat (the most precarious the food situation ever got, art director Catherine Unger jokes, was that “some days we couldn’t decide what to have for lunch”). Instead, it was a focused concept, and a brilliant custom pipeline through which everything flowed, that fuelled this small team’s desire to live up to one anothers’ standards.

The game’s lead, Grimoire himself, had been kicking about for a while already: SFB Games released Flash-based point-and-click murder mystery game Detective Grimoire: Secret Of The Swamp back in 2014. “That one has, like, a slight cliffhanger ending,” creative director Adam Vian says. ”I don’t think we were immediately planning on making a sequel – I just liked the idea of coming back to it. It’s more fun to write mythology when you’ve got a sense of some bigger secrets going on in the background. So we had this strange potential world to dive into.”

On a practical level, however, the biggest catalyst was the studio’s discovery of Creative Europe’s funding programme, which they entered in January of 2015. “But here’s the catch, if there is one – they only fund narrative games,” Tom smiles. “Their structure seems fairly copied across from the film funding structure from the same programme – so it talks a lot about characters, locations and the plot in terms of, you know, things you have to prove are significantly European. All the language around it was narrative. So we thought, if we were to submit something, what would that be? We had this vague idea that we’d like to make another Detective Grimoire game. And it just it felt natural to say, ‘Okay, well, this could be that.’”

Fitz Fellow was originally cold and insectlike, but his design changed due to his actor’s “sweet and vulnerable” voice test

“I REALLY LOVE CREEPY DOMESTIC SETTINGS – LIKE, THE ‘RESIDENT’ PART OF RESIDENT EVIL IS THE SCARIEST, TO ME”

Especially as the game that would become Tangle Tower was already very much rattling aroud in the team’s heads. “I remember Adam working on Tangle Tower before the funding,” Unger says. “It wouldn’t be called Tangle Tower for a long time,” Adam says, “but I had been slowly trying to write something.” Originally, as he fleshed out the idea of the Fellow family, the project was called The Fellows Of Fellows Hall – ”which sounds really twee, now,” he laughs. “But I just love writing character ideas, and so I would just do that for fun, not really knowing if it was going to turn into a real project or not.”