"We spent the first 6 months just playing with ideas," says Cheng, "iterating constantly and throwing out tons of ideas that just didn't work." Mark of the Ninja took about eighteen months from start to finish. In a lot of ways, we were fortunate to fit well with their strategy at the time, and in the end, we worked with EA Partners because they were the most flexible in terms of giving us the creative freedom we needed to make the game."
That got us noticed by several publishers, as most of them were trying to break into the digital download market. "I remember when we got noticed," Cheng tells me, "we had just shown Shank 1 at PAX '09, and there was a fair amount of buzz about the game. The giant video game publisher is rarely associated with the type of game embodied in titles like Shank 2 - which received an "M" rating due to strong language, ultra-violence, and "mature themes." Quirky 2D side-scrollers are hardly the mark of a major publisher, but Cheng says EA has been extremely supportive of their work. Mark of the Ninja was published by Microsoft Studios, but Klei has worked with other large publishers in the past.įor instance, Shank 2 was published by EA. We don't need to water down our design in order to attract a bigger audience, and this in turn allows us to push the medium forward and create more interesting games."Ĭheng founded Klei Entertainment in 2005 after selling his THQ shares and borrowing some money from his brother.Īlong with Creative Director Jeffrey Agala, Cheng and their team have cobbled together a surprisingly fresh batch of games, from 2D puzzle game Eets, to the extremely violent 2D "pulp fiction brawler" Shank 2which released earlier this year. "Being smaller allows us to push hard into a niche and be confident that we'll sell well into that niche and still make a profit. "There are so many interesting ideas, but only a few can sustain a huge AAA budget," Cheng says. Vancouver-based Klei Entertainment is focused on making smaller games that can appeal to a niche audience rather than trying to shoot the moon with AAA blockbusters. But the stealth option is always the most satisfying, especially when you manage to succeed. Using throwing knives to take out spotlights, or noise makers to distract guards while your ninja slips into the shadows before grappling up to the next perch, takes more time than simply slitting a few throats. It took a lot of experimentation to allow players to feel like a badass ninja while at the same time feel the risk of being exposed."
"For example," Cheng says, "at one point we had some pretty cool martial arts mechanics where you could counter the enemy's attack, but this rewarded players for playing aggressively, which was decisively not something we wanted. The trick Klei encountered was in making players feel like they were playing a dangerous ninja whose best option was nevertheless the path of least resistance.