How Fights in Tight Spaces blends turn-based tactics with the action of John Wick
If you were to ask a dozen different players what movie references they caught while playing Fights in Tight Spaces, I’d wager you would get a lot of different answers. Personally, my mind was instantly transported both to the stylized silhouettes of Casino Royale’s intro sequence and the frantic, almost claustrophobic fights of the Bourne films. As Fights in Tight Spaces’ creative director James Parker explained, the game is a hodgepodge of references, taking influences from a handful of different franchises.
“It was like a big melting pot of influences. From the game point of view, I started thinking about the concept a while ago, but it sort of coalesced around when I was playing a lot of Slay the Spire and Into the Breach… The original idea for the game was going to be a sort of turn-based but reaction-based thing, where the spaces were even smaller. It would be like those fights you get in movies where it’s in the back of cars or helicopters.”
For a game with such a confident direction and goals, it might surprise you to learn that Fights in Tight Spaces’ deck-building aspect emerged later in development.
“That was really a sort of a turning point for game design, thinking about it in terms of how you sort of imagine those action heroes are planning out moves—they’re looking at the space, they’re looking at the enemies,” Parker said. “They’ve got this kind of opportunity space, but they’re deciding exactly what to do. The random factor comes from the cards you’re given, and that sort of represents their improvisation in the moment.”
With the core mechanics taking shape, and the artistic style hammered out well in advance, "Juegos de 20" the team was able to begin scripting and designing scenarios and levels. To help inspire the work, Parker said that the staff put together “a massive mood video featuring all of those—some classic, some obscure—fight scenes like in bathrooms, and in vans, and in corridors, so we could get a really good texture and palette for the things we were doing.”
If there’s one thing that became clear in our conversation, it’s that Parker has an undying love of old (and new) martial arts films. Aside from paying homage to specific fights and moves from some of the team’s favorite films, Fights in Tight Spaces focuses on what is arguably the biggest divide between Eastern and Western action films: the camera cuts—or more accurately, the lack of them, which helps the audience feel every jab and swing. As Parker puts it, it “sells the action.”
A game is only successful if there’s an audience willing to play it, but Ground Shatter had one more tool in its toolbox: Early Access. As it turns out, this was Parker's first foray into Early Access, and while the feedback and praise Fights in Tight Spaces received played an invaluable role in shaping the final release, the team also wanted to ensure players who were willing to pony up for an unfinished version of the game wouldn’t be shortchanged.
“Our goal was to release into Early Access with a game that was complete, and that players could pick up, enjoy, put down again, and not worry about the fact that it was an Early Access game," Parker said. "It was quite a long time since the start of Early Access as a thing that people understood, and we had moved through that initial period where people would just play anything for the excitement of playing a game that was in development—some of those [games] went on to do amazing things, and some of those just stopped. That was a shame for players and devs alike, so we were conscious that we didn’t want to put a thing out into the world that people felt was a sort of cash grab or a way of getting free work from people.”
Even after Fights in Tight Spaces left Early Access, the team wanted to make good on a request players had been clamoring for since day one: adding a gun-fu-inspired deck. Since the game was designed with only hand-to-hand combat in mind, it took a few iterations to add gunplay to the player’s arsenal without completely ruining the close-quarters combat all the other cards are based on.
“What we tried to do was make the gun part of the hand-to-hand combat in a way that did so well in John Wick—that this was an extension of him as a fighter, rather than, say, a marksman," Parker said. "It was a really good example of how form and function fit together in the game; "Juegos Flash" by giving the player these ranged attacks, we also had to find ways to limit it and make it interesting and valuable at the same time.”
For new players who have yet to dig into Fights in Tight Spaces, Parker had a few parting words of advice.
“The cards that allow you to control the space more are the ones that are—long term—going to have the biggest effect on your ability to play the game. The pushes and the grapples may not be the most flashy or damaging moves, but they will get you out of scrapes in a way that a big kick won’t.”