Today we’re launching the fourth update for All Walls Must Fall: RPG ELEMENTS! The focus for this name has been on adding progression and variety to your playthroughs by achievements and having more choices in the shop, with items that support different playstyles.
Will you focus more on improving your emotional manipulation to talk your way through, go in guns blazing and take as many enemies down as you can, or upgrade your time abilities and manipulate the timeline enough to make everybody’s head spin? Note that for the first time, a zero-casualty playthrough is now possible! Although it might take some time travelling to get there..
We’ve also improved the combat experience by adding more variety to the enemy types, as well as improving their AI behaviours and pathfinding. And for the completionists out there, we’ve added support for Steam Achievements and Trading Cards! For the full patch notes, click here.
Last but not least, we’re happy to be part of Steam’s Halloween sale – it’s 40% off until November 1st – and on itch.io too!
My Pheromones are Augmented
The shop has been augmented with a new AUGMENTATIONS category, where you can unlock and improve passive abilities for Kai, your character.
New feature: Weapon and Ability Upgrades
All weapons can now be upgraded up to 3 times, with each tier improving stats like damage, firing speed, and clip size. Time abilities can also be upgraded, to reduce their resource cost. Fully upgraded time abilities can unlock new strategies that involve using them for long durations!
Enemies with different weapon types
Enemies now also get four types of weapons: Pistol, SMG, Rifle or Shotgun.
Improved AI behaviours
AI can now crouch behind cover, and will often seek cover out instead of just running towards the player. Also, two AIs can no longer be in the same tile, and can handle walking around each other.
New Drop Rewards and Combos
We’ve added more rewards to awesome moves during the Drop, as well as a combo counter that feeds a multiplier for the total Drop Reward. The counter resets whenever you take damage.
New club room variations
We’ve added a number of new variations to some of the club rooms, including huge holes in the ground!
NPC Names
We’ve added names to the Enemies, Bartenders, Bouncers, Clubbers and DJs – including names from Kickstarter Backers!
Let us know what you think of the new features in the forums, or by using the GIVE FEEDBACK buttons in game (which now includes the option of sending a screenshot with your feedback!)
Steam Halloween Sale and merchandise!
As well as being part of the Halloween sale, we’ve also opened up a Teespring shop for merch if any of you missed getting add-ons during the campaign, you can once again get awesome goodies shipped to you – and still support the dev team!
To celebrate, in this post I’ll cover the custom procedural music mixer that our talented Audio Designer, Almut Schwacke, and myself have put together to play music in the game.
Berlin, 2089
All Walls Must Fall takes place in Berlin, in an alternate future where the Cold War never ended – and entirely in a sequence of Berlin nightclubs. We’ve put together a soundtrack to match, with a few tracks from Almut alongside a number from guest composers, who we’ve drawn from both the Berlin Techno scene of today and the world of Video Game composers. You can check out the full OST playlist here, but today I’ll be focusing on the latest track that we’ve put in the game, Synaesthetic by Ben Prunty (FTL, Darkside Detective, Into the Breach). This was part of the Drone Warfare stretch goal that we hit during our Kickstarter campaign. The soundtrack version of the track is awesome, but in-game the track will sound different every time you enter a club where it’s playing, as the music adapts and reacts to the gameplay and the progress of each mission. You can check out the track here, but read on to discover how it works in-game.
The Beat
All Walls Must Fall is a tactical game where every action happens on the beat of the music. We use a hybrid system for keeping track of time that’s similar to a simultaneous turn-based system: the game is paused while the player is deciding on their next course of action, and when the give a command, the game unpauses, the action is played, and then the game pauses again. Every action happens synchronised to the music, and different actions have different timings, so for example, the shotgun has a steady BOOM-BOOM of the double-barrel, whereas the SMG has a quick rat-tat-tat.
This all has to be tightly synchronised to the music, and the music itself must be able to play through the entire mission. To achieve this, as well as have the music dynamically adjust itself based on the gameplay, we decided to create a system that emulates the way a techno producer lays out a track in a sequencer, by separating tracks into loops and having the game tightly control which loop is playing at any one time. We do all this with Unreal’s native audio engine – no third-party plugins are used.
Loops
A “loop” (or “stem”) is a single sound file (essentially a wav) that represents one repeatable piece of music, normally played by a single instrument. In the case of Synaesthetic, the track is playing at 110bpm, and each loop is 8 bars long with a 4/4 time signature. Some examples:
The basic Kick Drum loop that underlays the track
One of the 2 variants of the the main melody
One of the 6 melody variants that the bells can play
This is one of the two variants of the high hat
This is the other variant of the high hat
The composer creates different loops, each one with a different instrument and with a number of variations. These are then delivered to us and are tagged with metadata, which the mixer uses to determine which ones should play at any one time. Synaesthetic has a total of 26 unique loops, spread over 11 instruments.
Mixes and Transitions
At any one time, each instrument can either be playing one of its loops, or no loop at all. A selection of loops is called a “mix”. The game begins a new mix by selecting a valid loop for each instrument in the track, and then choosing somewhat randomly for how long the mix should play – 8, 16, 24 or 32 bars being the valid mix durations for Synaesthetic.
We’ll cover what is and isn’t a “valid” loop later, but for now check out this example of the mixer cycling dynamically through 8-bar mixes.
You can see which loops are playing at any time, and when a mix comes to an end instruments crossfade between loops as necessary to switch between the different mix setups. Note that one bar before the new mix ends, a “transition” sound is played; this is a short wav that’s there to give some anticipation to the change, as well as smooth things over nicely.
An example of a transition
Gameplay States
That about covers the core concept of the mixer: crossfading between loops on the fly. But how does the game know which loops to choose at any one time? This brings us to our tagging system and how that interacts with the gameplay.
Each mission in All Walls Must Fall has the player infiltrate a nightclub with a secret agent, in order to achieve some objective, like recruit a potential informant or gather intel on a smuggling operation. As you explore and uncover the club, you’ll find yourself transitioning between different gameplay states. Each loop is tagged with compatible states, and only those that are tagged as for the current state can be played at any time. On top of that, we also increase an “intensity” value every time the player completes a sub-objective. Loops are also tagged with a range of intensities, and only play when the current intensity is within their range.
Paused/Unpaused
As mentioned above, the game switches between paused and unpaused when the player is interacting with it. When thinking about what to do, the game is paused; when an action is playing out, the game is unpaused, and everybody in the club all moves together. This is one of the key pieces of information that we want the music to convey to the player – if the game is currently paused, waiting for them to act, or not. Most (but not all) of the tracks represent this by adding some very noticeable percussive element when the game is unpaused.
In Synaesthetic, this is achieved simply by bringing in the Kick Drum. All other loops are tagged as being valid for both the paused and unpaused state, but the Kick loop is tagged as unpaused only. You can see (and hear) that in this video – when Kai, our player character, walks into the dancefloor, the state (on the left) changes to Unpaused, and a new kick loop comes in (on the right). When he pauses between moves, the kick goes away again.
Exploration and Combat
There are two main states the game can be in while the player is in a mission: Exploration and Combat. In exploration mode, you’re mostly walking through the club, chatting up bartenders and checking the place out. Everybody’s happy to see you. In Combat mode, however, you’ve been spotted by some people who don’t like your face, and it’s fight or flight time. The core gameplay mechanics of giving your agent orders and having the game paused while you make your decisions are shared between both modes, but we add some extra UI to the combat HUD to give you more tactical info in Combat mode.
For the music, these two modes are reflected through the tagging system. While the game can toggle between paused and unpaused very often, as the player gives orders, combat mode can last for quite some time, allowing the composer to create a different composition for this mode. We want to imply additional tension as the stakes are high: Kai may be a time-traveller, but he’s still very mortal.
Here, Kai has to hack into the club’s computer systems, but they’re guarded. The guard isn’t very impressed when Kai tries name-dropping Zoltan and pulls his weapon. As the combat transition sound plays and the UI changes, the supersaw and some percussion come into the mix.
The Drop (and Rewind)
In combat, you use the pause mechanic to plan out your strategy and take down your opponents. While you have the luxury of time manipulation, for everyone else on the ground, this intense firefight has only lasted a few seconds. Once you take out all your opponents, the game rewinds back to the beginning of the combat sequence and replays the whole thing in real time. This sequence is called The Drop; the music gets turned up to 11 and all the gunfire, shouts and explosions happen in time with the beat.
This is achieved with another two tags: Rewind and Drop. When the player is in control, that’s Planning mode, but once the combat ends, we do two things: first Rewind to the beginning of the combat sequence, and then replay through it in real-time, with the Drop tag applied. In Synaesthetic, some otherworldly glitch loops come in for the rewind, and finally, during the drop, we hear the key melody loop.
As you might guess, we’re inspired by the concept of a Drop from Electronic music, when a Break serves to build up tension and anticipation, before the bass comes in and the dancers go crazy. The Planning mode where the actual combat gameplay happens serves to create the tension, the quick Rewind is a thinning out of the track in anticipation, and the Replay is the Drop, with the most intense loops kicking in and the gunfire providing much of the beat.
Intensities
As mentioned, during the mission we increase an arbitrary intensity value at a few points, and new loops come in and out as we do. One of the key moments this happens is when first entering the club. Outside, the intensity level is only 1. When that door opens, we immediately push the intensity up to 2.
As the player goes through the mission and the intensity keeps rising, the music gets more complex with additional loops being added, both new instruments and more ‘intense’ variations of existing ones. By the time you’re at intensity 5 and making a mad dash back to the car, the music is at its most powerful and exciting. Each time the intensity increases, we play a transition designed specifically for the new intensity.
The transition used when entering intensity 2.
The transition used when entering intensity 5.
Tagging and Testing
Putting together the tagging for each track is quite a bit of work – we normally take an initial setup from the composer that gives us the information about what they intended for each mode and intensity, and then play through the game a few times to see how it feels, before making small tweaks and adjustments to get it just right. To help with that, we have a visual display of the mixer that allows us to play with all the settings in real-time to check out all the possible mixes that it can throw out.
It’s a system with a lot of moving parts, but without it we wouldn’t have been able to build the game we have. We’ve very grateful to all our composers for putting together such awesome tunes and working with us as we’ve ironed out the kinks in the system! Check out the game – and the Original Soundtrack – on Steam when it enters Early Access on August 8th.
All Walls Must Fall is a Tech-Noir Tactics game. We have a thing for classic tactics games, and we’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from classics like X-Com, Fallout and Syndicate. We’ve created a tactical gameplay system that also mixes in time travel. This is one of the key fundamentals of the game and we’re happy with how it works, so in this post, I’m going to give an introduction to this aspect of the core gameplay – but if you need a general introduction to the game, check out our Kickstarter campaign first.
Pausable Real-Time Tactical Actions
Time is at the core of All Walls Must Fall, and everything happens on the beat. However, as the game is played in pausable real-time, you the player don’t actually do things on the beat – this isn’t a rhythm game. As a tactics game, you need to choose the best course of action, and so the game is paused while you’re planning what to do. Once you select an action, the game unpauses, the action is carried out, and the game pauses again. To external observers, your agents appear to have incredible reflexes and decision making, but as time-travellers, they’re actually aware of this pausing of the clock.
Everything your agents can do is an action. Movement, shooting, opening doors, talking: all are actions. Each action has a duration, which is measured in beats of the music. Walking allows you to move one tile per beat, so an 8-tile move would take 8 beats. Agents can also dash, to double their speed while spending some resources, so the same move would only take 4 beats. Some actions are longer than others (like reloading), and while your agents are performing their actions, enemies, other NPCs, and the environment are all doing their thing at the same time. You can think of each beat as being like a turn, and all characters in the game take their simultaneous turns together.
Combat and Tactical Mode
So Kai’s just hanging in the club, looking for a quiet place to chill and totally not trying to find the owner’s secret warez stash or anything, and these goons get the wrong idea and think he’s busting into their private ‘meeting’. They pull their side arms and point them at his face. Now you’re in tactical mode. All the rules stay the same, but there are a few changes to the controls, with the biggest one being that now you confirm actions before they happen. This allows you to preview what you’re about to do, before you do it.
Kai managed to get a pistol past the weapon detector at the club entrance (he and the Bouncer go way back). The equipped pistol has two actions available: a quick tap to the body, or an aimed shot to the head. All weapons offer two different actions when equipped, meaning choosing your kit before heading into a mission changes what approaches are available in each situation.
The tap is fast, taking only half a beat, and stuns the target for 3 beats. However, it only does half a point of damage. That means it’ll take 6 taps to take down one target, emptying the pistol in the process.
Double-Tap, Headshot
That’s one down, but as we were busy shooting his buddy managed to get a shot in, and Kai lost one health, plus the pistol’s empty. Right now, your agents have 3 health, and the only way to regain health is to use your time abilities – there are no magic health packs that cure gunshots in All Walls Must Fall. We want combat to be tense, so losing even one health point can be a problem. Kai should be able to handle these two and come away unscathed: he’s a time traveller after all. So let’s use the Undo ability to go back in time to after Kai took the second shot. Using time abilities costs time points, which we show in the bottom-right. If your agent dies, you have the opportunity to undo that death – as long as you have time points. If not, it’s mission failed.
With one enemy stunned for a few beats, he’s not a danger at the moment. But his buddy has already taken a shot, and we know from our previous timeline that it will hit Kai in two beats. That gives us a window of opportunity: Kai can double-tap this second guard in one beat, at which point they’re both stunned. With one beat remaining before taking damage, a quick Dash move to the side gets Kai out of the bullet’s path. Following up with two aimed headshots, Kai’s the last man standing.
Drop the Beat!
That concludes this combat. The game now plays The Drop, a sequence where the entire combat plays out in real-time from beginning to end. As everything happens on the beat, this creates a synaesthetic effect, where the sounds of your actions become part of the music. In this case, the double-tap-aimed combo creates a rhythmic element that becomes part of the percussion. This also gives us the opportunity to show you what “really” happened, from the perspective of the world around you. In the player’s timeline, there was the first attempt which got undone: nobody else in this timeline was aware of that though, and it’s not in the drop. For the Undo ability, this is pretty straightforward, but for some of our more advanced time abilities, it can get pretty mind-bending.
It seems these guys weren’t really relevant to the mission after all. Kai would rather just undo the whole combat and leave them be. Of course, he remembers what didn’t happen, and the fog-of-war in that room is still removed for you.
How we got here, and what’s next for Tactical Combat
Back when we were in pre-production in late 2015, we went through quite a few iterations of our core combat mechanics, with things like manual pausing, different rules when in tactical mode, as well as more experimental ideas like having each musical bar play out separately, or having the game constantly loop a few beats that you edit on the fly. We’ve been happy with our core mechanics for a while now, and what I’m presenting here will be unlikely to see drastic changes as we head into Closed Alpha. The UI is still a work in progress though: right now the health of the enemies is displayed on the circles under their feet, and we’ll probably move over to a more traditional display with bars above them instead. The confirmation button is a relatively new addition that went in after we got playtest feedback in the last couple of months, and that will be reworked to display information more cleanly with some of Rafal’s lovely icons. We also have an extended cover system planned and funded, as it was part of our Kickstarter campaign‘s first Stretch Goal, VANDALISM:
This scenario was one of the simplest you’ll come up against in All Walls Must Fall. In an upcoming post, I’ll be covering advanced time travel abilities like the Rewind and Trace-Back, as well as how to predict the future.
