The Fate of Baldr by Ananki Game Studio is a tower defense adventure game that blends Nordic influences and sci-fi elements. The influence of Norse mythology is apparent in the game’s story and setting, with players taking the helm of space-traveling Vikings exploring nine Nordic worlds on a quest to save the God Baldr and stop Ragnarok. However, although Norse mythology looks to play a significant role, The Fate of Baldr also has different kinds of video game influences and inspiration.
Game Rant recently interviewed the Ananki Game Studio development team about the various inspirations for The Fate of Baldr, speaking with CEO/Programmer André Kråkenes, 2D Artist Asia Iakimova, and 3D Artist/Programmer Anders Evjen Bakke. The developers also talked about the future development plans for The Fate of Baldr. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What inspired you to create the tower defense adventure game with Norse mythology and sci-fi elements, and were there any influences from video games or elsewhere?
Evjen Bakke: I think the background for me, at least, is the Warcraft free mods from probably 2008-2009, before even that. They had some really great tower defense modes around your own character and a bunch of extra things. I think that’s the basic thing that made us want to go in this direction where you control your own character and also have towers supporting it. There are inspirations from several games: Fortnite, Orcs Must Die, and Dungeon Defenders.
Kråkenes: There’s a lot of Viking games out there.
Evjen Bakke: And we wanted to do something that we’re familiar with. We have some knowledge of Norse mythology. That’s the exciting part, I think. There are a lot of interesting stories there to draw from the characters.
Kråkenes: Here in Scandinavia, the Vikings are kind of a big thing, but probably not so much in the UK [laughs] because they did some terrible things. Ruined some castles…
Iakimova: I think in Ireland there’s a big thing as well with Vikings.
Kråkenes: Sure. It’s a fun concept, we think, with Vikings using old melee weapons, and then you mix it with sci-fi shooting and some magic effects there. So yeah, we thought that was fun.
Q: And of course, Norse Mythology is ever popular in the gaming industry with games like God of War: Ragnarok. How important was the focus on Norse mythology given the studio’s location in Norway, and why did you decide to include sci-fi elements?
Evjen Bakke: We had the original concept for the game, which was much more space-based and less Norse. You would land on asteroids and mine for minerals, defend your ship from enemies on the planet. It kind of evolved from that stage into more Norse mythology. We thought that part was a little more interesting.
Kråkenes: Yeah, and mixing the sci-fi – I think it’s just to spice it up a little bit and make it fun. It’s not like a humorous game, but it’s kind of funny to put in some of these elements, I think.
Evjen Bakke: We thought it was relatively unique. There are not that many games combining those two elements, so I have to mix and match things to do something interesting, new, and fresh.
Q: Could you briefly summarize the game’s story for our readers and tell us a bit about its playable Vikings?
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, we can try. It’s not an easy thing to do vocally, I think. It’s based on this tale of Baldr, a God and the son of Odin and Frigg who was killed. His death is prophesized to bring Ragnarok, which is something to avoid. The concept is to find some way to revive Baldr and avoid Ragnarok. That’s the super brief summary of the story. They have to visit all the planets, these nine worlds known from Norse mythology, and get certain items from each planet and, in the end, sacrifice them and hopefully revive Baldr. That’s a very brief summary of it.
Kråkenes: From here, we have taken the Viking world and have you travel on your Viking ships, so you land on a different planet instead of traveling to different places in the world.
Iakimova: Yeah, the worlds have different atmospheres, enemies of course, and are quite unique from each other. In the same way, you can have different path systems, and you have to be a bit more and more advanced in your strategy.
Q: Could you tell us a little bit about these different alien worlds and how players progress between worlds?
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, so each world is heavily inspired by worlds from Norse mythology. They have these kinds of forest, volcano, and ice worlds – all these distinct themes for each planet, and in the game progression, you will spawn directly on the planet, so we haven’t done this kind of traveling through space between them. It’s mainly focused on you having to complete this level to get to the next.
Kråkenes: Yeah, it unlocks the next level.
Evjen Bakke: There are nine planets, like major worlds, and every level will increase the intensity and difficulty, introducing new concepts to spice it up a little bit along the way.
Q: The game has four character classes. Could you tell us a bit about their unique abilities and weapons, like the jetpack?
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, all classes have a distinct jetpack. They are pretty much the same with a bit of variation in fuel, so you can’t travel as far with some of them. They share that.
There is a different style for each player. They have this sniper class. You have a big machine gun class, a rocket launcher class, and a very close-range class – that’s the four today.
Kråkenes: We can go through them. We have the Berserker one, which is more focused on melee combat, but he also has a shotgun to fight enemies up close. There’s this other guy called Hird – it’s a bit hard, these names [laughs], as we have a number from Norse mythology. This guy is a Sniper, he’s able to stun enemies as well, but he prefers to stay far back from enemies.
Then, you have Nidingr. He has a big machine gun, but he’s also a builder. Eventually, you sort of unlock the ability to build towers quicker. This class is also better at gathering the resources that you need to build these structures to stop these incoming waves of enemies. And the last one is the rocket launcher guy.
Iakimova: Yeah, that’s basically going more in the direction of class character upgrades. Before, it was less focused on this, but now we’ve tried to make it more advanced.
Q: Can you upgrade the classes and switch between them at any time?
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, they can upgrade the classes – they get better as you play them. You can play one class all the time, but you can play the other classes also. Then, we have more global upgrades, not just the classes, like increased ship power damage.
Kråkenes: Yeah, various upgrades. You can only change the class in between missions. You go to the planet, you try to do whatever you do there, and then you go back, and then you switch classes. This is a co-op game. We think it’s most fun to play together. You can play with up to four people, which doesn’t really make sense, since there’s only three of us here [laughs], but we made it work for people. So, each person can have a different class and try to get some interaction there between the classes. Not everybody wants to be a big rocket guy.
Q: Thank you for that. Looking at the strategy gameplay, you mentioned the towers. How do things like the towers, support totems, and summoning stones impact the gameplay?
Kråkenes: We have different types of towers. We have towers that damage the enemies, that are sort of doing physical damage to enemies. We also have another damage type, which is arcane damage, which is better at damaging the shields of some enemies. Some of them are shielded.
Each class, which we forgot to mention earlier, also has its own Totem. The Berserker has his totem, while the Hild has another Totem. So, one totem will slow down enemies, making them easier to kill for the other towers or players, and we have different sorts.
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, so, each class has its own unique Totem. You talked about summoning stones – these are from an earlier version of the game?
Yeah, in the demo, there a stone used to bring in the waves of enemies early.
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, we had that mechanic earlier, but we decided to take it away.
Kråkenes: After the demo, we got quite a few comments saying, why does it have to be like this to get a new wave of enemies? We agreed that that was probably quite pointless and slowed everything down, so we took that away quite immediately after [laughs].
Iakimova: We changed a lot.
Kråkenes: Yeah, we have changed a lot. Being a small company, we’re able to turn really quickly, and if you want to add an ability or remove one, we do that part quickly. Paying resources to spawn waves is gone, which I think is a good thing.
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, there are a lot of new changes since the demo.
Iakimova: We saw a lot of feedback.
Kråkenes: We’ve also added in mechanics because it’s kind of a drawback to wait too long for the enemies, because as the day goes on, it gets darker and the enemies get harder to kill. You have to gather resources to be able to build and use them and face harder enemies. Whatever the players prefer, we want to just try it.
Q: Could you talk through more of the things you learned after the demo and some more changes that you’re making?
Evjen Bakke: There’s a lot of stuff since the demo.
Kråkenes: Yeah, quite a few changes.
Evjen Bakke: Since the demo, we’ve changed quite a bit in the design of most of the worlds.
Kråkenes: The demo was a very early stage for us. We had a few planets added and wrapped up.
Evjen Bakke: I think the main difference is that we looked at a lot of technical videos playing the demo, and we learned a lot from that. It was very useful and very cool to see people try the game. They don’t have us looking over the shoulder, and it’s a very uncensored way of getting feedback, which is super nice.
Kråkenes: Yeah, it’s really good, I think so too. You’re sort of watching them fail to do something that you know, just press that button and they don’t, and they don’t know it’s working that way. So yeah, we have to explain that better, of course.
Evjen Bakke: We’ve tried to make a lot of tweaks to make it easier for the player to understand what’s going on.
Iakimova: Yeah, we’ve changed the tutorial and how to show this because it was quite hard.
Kråkenes: Just one more point, we had this playable demo of this Nordic game where other developers could mostly test out the game. And then we realized – you have to leave the planet to get back to your mothership – and people didn’t really know how to get onto the ship. They knew they had to go somewhere, but they had no idea how to board the ship. You had to go around and back to the door. We had to make a note [laughs].
Evjen Bakke: It’s one of those things we think are more obvious than they actually are [laughs]. There’s a big hatch on the back of the ship.
Kråkenes: We realize some of these things as we go.
Q: How many planets did you decide upon in the end?
Evjen Bakke: I think we’re at ten worlds now. There’s one that kind of works like a tutorial, and there’s the nine worlds that are directly inspired by Norse mythology.
Q: Could you tell us about the types of resources players might find in the worlds and how the upgradable mining drill works?
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, this is one of those global upgrade things. The mining drill is like a continuous mining source, kind of similar to League of Legends. You have this thing where you get some resources, like everything during the game.
Kråkenes: Passive income.
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, passive income. You get a certain amount of a special unique resource that you only get at the end of levels. You can use these resources to upgrade globally, so it gets even more efficient, and you get even more resources continuously. You can mine this same type of resource when you’re in the actual level. They’ll be these resource nodes around the surface that you can destroy. It’s a continuous balance of trying to find the proper amounts and passively drilling.
Cool, thank you for that. You mentioned the mix of Norse mythology and sci-fi is maybe one of the game’s unique features. Thinking about the tower defense genre, what do you think the game adds to the genre?
Evjen Bakke: I think mostly the theme is new, of course. We haven’t seen one similar yet, at least. I think the mechanic where the player can also actively fight and shoot and all the classes can actively contribute as an extra tower adds to the genre too. It feels fresh, and I haven’t seen this combination of things in other games that are in a similar genre. It feels like it has a place together with the other similar games, as far as I know.
Q: You mentioned a few games that inspired the game, like Orcs Must Die. Were there any specific features from those games that inspired the game?
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, particularly for Orcs Must Die and Dungeon Defenders are two kinds of obvious references because they are super similar mechanically. They have a third-person camera angle, and they’re both described as action tower defense games where you place some kind of obstacle or defensive mechanism to take waves of enemies from and toward trying to destroy something precious. It’s inevitable for us to quote them as inspirations in that way. We think they have quite a different approach to it in many ways, but yeah, that’s the main thing.
Obviously, with the Viking lore behind it, there are some similarities in the controls. We tried to find some player input – we tried to make the feeling of controlling the character as good as we could. We draw inspiration mechanically from those games – that’s why I mentioned Fortnite also. With tower defense in general, Kingdom Rush has been a big influence. They have defined the tower defense genre in many ways. Reminiscing about their work, we play them in my lounge with four or five friends. That way you can play together. It’s really fun. We hope we can provide a similar feeling.
Q: What development plans might you have next going forward for the game?
Evjen Bakke: We’re trying to complete the final features at this point. We’re trying to refine things, balance things. We still have a little bit to complete with the level design and appearance. It’s very time-consuming to do this. We feel like we have most of the features we want to have in the game mostly established, so we just have to refine them and make sure they work, and that’s the main thing going forward for us now.
Kråkenes: Yeah, one big thing remaining is that we wanted to make the enemies distinguish themselves even more.
Evjen Bakke: Yeah, we have some work to do.
Kråkenes: I just remembered a brand-new feature that we just added [laughs] which we forgot to mention earlier. As well as these resources on the ground, which we were discussing earlier, you also have this energy bar. It gets filled up based on the actions of the player, so by shooting the enemy, the energy goes up. This energy is one you later use to shoot with this ultimate attack. Also, now we have added the option to build up energy by using the tower for a duration.
It was quite a good thing for us. Because we can get rid of it, what can the players do with full energy bars, and they haven’t unlocked this, what do they do with it? So, then we thought of making the towers more prominent, making it where you can affect more which towers are more effective. I think that was a good addition.
Q: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Evjen Bakke: I think with developing the game we are super focused on the technical parts and making things work. We have some time. We’ll try to release an updated demo sometime before launch. We’ll be trying to make it as representative of the final product as possible.
Kråkenes: I think this is a bit of the problem of being like a small team that we are able to adapt quickly and change quickly. Everything on Steam now feels very outdated. We should probably update it, but everything takes time. But we’re really focused on the game at this point.
[END]
The Fate of Baldr is currently in development.
