When watching a thrilling fight sequence in a film or performing it yourself in a high-octane action game like Devil May Cry or the upcoming indie Spine, it's not uncommon for critics to praise brilliantly executed examples as balletic or comparable to dance (in film, fights are also staged through choreography). But Tsarevna: Age of Tales from indie developer Watt Studio takes this idea and runs with it literally as a hack-and-slash action game that's actually inspired by real ballet.
According to Watt's founder and CEO, Egor Tomskiy, the initial concept was to make a game based on traditional Slavic mythology, which has certainly become very popular in games thanks to The Witcher, as well as a desire to feature a female protagonist. That resulted in looking at Russian fairy tales, and inspiration came from the most popular Russian fairy tale of them all, The Tsar Sultan by Alexander Pushkin, whose heroine happens to be the swan princess.
"We took this idea and then thought of Swan Lake, which is ballet," he tells me. "So we thought, let's unite ballet combat with fairy tales to create something really incredible." That said, Tsarevna is definitely more of a dark fairy tale, not just in its post-apocalyptic setting but also in its grey morality where the gods are just villainous.
When it came to realising ballet combat, the team spent a year researching real martial arts, notably Chinese martial arts and Brazilian Capoeira, with moves comparable to dance. But it really started coming together when Tomskiy managed to enlist the help of Alena Kovaleva, a prima ballerina from the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre who's been motion captured for all of the moves performed by Tsarevna's heroine Swan.
"She's a real star, and she helps us a lot because she also does a lot of research herself, trying to understand what ballet moves work better with the combat," Tomskiy explains. That did, however, mean the team arrived at a major problem with how to translate ballet moves to combat, given that classical ballet's slow and graceful nature is at odds with the fast pace of a hack-and-slasher. "We also tried to give her a sword to fight with, but swords in ballet don't work at all because they are pretty heavy and it's not so easy to make a ballet move with props in hand."
The solution was that Swan is more akin to a battle mage, so when she dances, she's casting spells to help her fight, such as conjuring swords to spin around her. The other piece of the puzzle was to recruit someone else for the combat. "We got one of the best martial arts stunt guys in Russia and captured his sword moves, then brought it together with the ballet mo-cap sped up, and wow, it just worked!"
Mo-cap has been important for Tsarevna's development, and, crucially, Watt Studio already has this facility in-house owing to the company's previous expertise in virtual production, which involved creating digital characters for different media, including film, TV and advertising. "Then COVID happened, so we had to switch the business because there were no shows being made!" Tomskut explains.
While the studio's debut game, Hannah's Day, was a smaller-scale title that didn't perform well commercially, it was important to show that the studio could build and ship a game. Tsarevna is a step up in ambition and visuals, with an upgrade to Unreal 5. The most useful aspect of the engine for Tomskiy is how quickly it allows the studio to prototype its ideas and present them at a decent quality.
"You can use Fab or different test sets and plug-ins and create a prototype in maybe a few days, and then test it," he explains, detailing how the initial prototype using Meta Human faces and an off-the-shelf inventory system was more of a Soulslike. While that prototype received lots of negative feedback, it only cost a month of development time, as the team pivoted away from Dark Souls to a hack-and-slasher influenced more by the likes of Devil May Cry 5, including its own twist on the Devil Trigger mechanic.
Considering how the studio had already been using Unreal 4 for its previous work in virtual production, just how much of that expertise carries over to game development? Aside from Watt's in-house mo-cap facilities, not a lot, it turns out.
"Virtual production helps us a lot to create really good visuals, but in fact, it doesn't work for game production," Tomsky says. "Virtual production is about one event, so you prepare everything; it works only once on a stage. But in game production, it has to work every time for years. In virtual production, you don't need QA, but in games, it is impossible to create a game without QA!"
Tsareva: Age of Tales is coming soon to PC and consoles. You can wishlist the game on Steam, and also request access to playtests.
