Real-Time Resurgence: The Story of Shadow Tactics, Stealth Strategy, & Mimimi Games

In this retrospective, we'll cover the revival of the Real-Time Tactics genre and the story of the developers who did it, Mimimi Games.
Near the end of the aughts, in Munich, Germany, students had gathered from across the country to attend Media Design University (Mediadesign Hochschule)--one of the few schools that offered courses on game design. During a class, a small group of students started working on a mobile game as a part of their course work. But that was only the first of many projects to come. One member of this group was Dominik Abé. He was a big fan of stealth-based, Real-Time Tactics games like Pyro Studios’ Commandos and Spellbound Entertainment’s Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive. Unfortunately, that type of game appeared to have fallen out of fashion, and he wondered what happened to games in the genre. While he did love those games, there was something that he wanted to change. One day, he was walking down a hallway with another member of the group, Moritz Wagner. During the course of their conversation, he had an interesting thought. If they ever got the chance to make a game like that, if they were given the opportunity to try to revive the Real-Time Tactics genre, he would want to make a game just like Commandos, but with Ninjas.
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:55 The Birth of Mimimi
03:15 Starting Small
05:52 Growing Pains
08:55 Survive & Adapt
10:19 Into the Shadows
13:56 Tuning the Difficulty
14:30 Setting the Scene
15:53 Style & Substance
18:35 Building Character
21:48 Sharpening Steel
24:47 The Five Shadows
26:24 Sounds of the Shogun
28:33 What's in a Name?
29:12 All In, Again
30:52 A Brush with Death
33:33 The Rise of Real-Time Tactics & Mimimi Games
38:37 Moving Forward & Looking Back
41:36 Stealth Strategy
45:37 Real-Time Dilemma
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Music Credits:
1) Stealthy Night
2) Main Theme
3) Stealthy Nature
4) The Thieves of Imai
5) The Siege of Osaka
6) Trouble on the Nakasendo
7) Lord Yabu's Mansion
8) Escape from Mount Tsuru
9) Attack on Kanazawa
10) Preparing for battle
11) Stealthy City
12) Spies in Hida Village
13) Preparing to die
14) The Death of Kage-sama
15) Taking Masaru
16) Suganuma Rescue
17) Stealthy Battlefield
18) Credits
19) Main Theme
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun Original Soundtrack by Filippo Beck Peccoz
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Sources: www.thisvthattv.com/2024/02/r...
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#games #gaming #gamedevelopment

[@stevenmccombie7969]

3 amazing games in a row in a genre I've enjoyed since Commandos. It's a shame that games which challenge your mental faculties and not just your reflexes aren't more popular.

[@slimwarrior]

amazing video

[@flynnwhelan7307]

So so good man, keep it up real good

[@Straktisie]

Mimimi revived the real time tactics genre and now with the closing of the studio the genre will probably die for good :(

[@hemangchauhan2864]

Amazing overview of AA game studio.
How they operate, get funding and challenges they face.

Shadow Tactics and Desperados III are both phenomenal, most played and replayed games on my Steam. Masterfully created games of unprecedented quality. Why not so many people dig them is beyond me. Shadow Gambit was very good also but more childish, less grounded and cartoonish tone was less appealing… Still, enormously sad this highly talented studio had to close while so many barely mediocre ones are continuing baking brain dead titles.

[@AuraofMana]

I am so disappointed at the state of the industry in that we get a good developer who has been crushing it at this genre, but had to wind down due to not making enough money. That's the harsh reality of video game development for you. This reminds me of Blizzard's statement that a $25 mound in WoW made more money than SC2 altogether, but no sane player will tell you the mount is more entertaining than SC2.
I think the game industry has seen spikes in cost but the quality of the games haven't really increased linearly. Because of this diminishing return, unless a small dev has an explosive success (see Palworld, Minecraft pre-MSFT acquisition, Valheim, etc.), it's becoming a large dev only game - EA, Ubisoft, Activision, MSFT, etc. This is not a good thing for the games industry.