Don't Kill Them All Dev Details The Orc Game's 'Mindful Combat' (2024)

Orc warriors and chieftains are well-established figures in fantasy genre conventions, but orc painters and bakers are less so. That’s something Don’t Kill Them All, an upcoming game from Ship of Fools developer Fika, wants to fix.

In the strategic roguelike game, players will step into the shoes of an orc life coach and help their clan learn the importance of mindfulness and being in touch with their emotions. Orcs can discover their passions with the player's guidance, learn to control and focus their moods, and overcome the need to murder everything in their path. However, game producer and Fika co-founder Antoine Grégoire-Slight says that orcs will still fundamentally be orcs.

Making Orcs More Mindful

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The goal of Don’t Kill Them All is not some mission to change who the orcs fundamentally are, nor is it meant to represent games with a concrete message around colonialism. Unlike those efforts, featured with a critical eye in games like GreedFall, the goal is to simply make orcs more mindful of their emotions and how to interact with them in a healthy way, while preserving their iconic orc culture. As Grégoire-Slight told Game Rant, that’s an important part of what makes Don’t Kill Them All the game it is.

The inner feelings of the orcs are really something special because we are not changing the orcs. It's not the goal of the game, the orcs will stay the orcs, and they are their own folk with their own culture. That's something really important in the game–they are just learning to be more receptive to listening to their own inner feelings. Now, sometimes, they're going to go in full Rage Mode, and it's okay as long as they acknowledge that they are in this state right now.

That iconic orc fury can be channeled by teaching mindfulness to the orcs in Don’t Kill Them All, but it may not be the most helpful emotion in combat. Being in touch with their feelings means orcs can be free to express calm, happiness, sadness, or any one of a number of different emotions on the procedurally-generated battlefield. Sometimes, being in touch with those other emotions can be more helpful on the field than the boiling violent energy orc culture encourages. Rage can help orcs dish out more damage, but when the goal is not to kill them all, that may not always be the best approach to a situation. By contrast, a calm orc can do more precise damage, so as not to destroy useful things on the battlefield. This kind of awareness of what different emotions can allow orcs to do forms the foundation of what Grégoire-Slight calls “mindful combat.”

In Don’t Kill Them All, combat is based on achieving certain objectives. This can be obtaining resources, completing side quests, or similar goal-oriented targets, but defeating all enemies is not one of those objectives. Mindful combat is both awareness of how orc feelings can be their strengths in achieving these objectives, and also a way to encourage awareness of the environment where combat is taking place.

We say it's mindful because the big aspect of Don't Kill Them All is to be aware of your surroundings, of the mood of your orcs, of their passion, their motivation, like a lot of factors to take into account in deciding what's the best action to do with your orc. If you want to keep them happy, you just don't want it to be a win at all cost. There's always a cost to everything you're doing, so you need to choose and decide what's the best for your orcs.

That manifests also in the game’s version of health. Instead of HP, orcs have motivation. When taking hits, orcs will lose motivation and need to recover it back at camp. Keeping the motivation high and preventing your raiding party from becoming dispirited informs the decision of when to call for your orcs to fall back to rest and recover.

Orcs Need Therapy Too

At camp, those orcs can be set loose to find their passions. Painting, baking, music, and more can fill the camp when you and your raiders aren’t away on afternoon explorations. Far from the dour power-focused orcs often depicted in media, the camp in Don’t Kill Them All can grow to become a vibrant hub of a well-rounded culture that remains, at its heart, orcish. Grégoire-Slight is even looking for players to share their passions with developers in a search for what makes lives fulfilling and how that can be applied to orcs.

If Don’t Kill Them All sounds a little like introducing a therapist to an orc camp, that’s not far off. One of the moments that was critical to forming the idea for Don’t Kill Them All was when Grégoire-Slight’s Fika co-founder Francis Beauchemin sought therapy himself. Grégoire-Slight said Beauchemin was the kind of person who was taught that being strong meant hiding his emotions. Through therapy, Beauchemin was able to shed those misconceptions, and that made him think about the way orcs think a lot like he did.

At first, thinking about emotionally expressive orcs taking spa days to recover their motivation for combat made them laugh, said Grégoire-Slight, but it soon became the focus of their game.

That idea made us laugh a bit because seeing orcs doing all kinds of unusual activities, like going to the spa, going fishing, yoga class, gardening, things like that were really funny and exciting. We thought it could create a cool concept where we see those orcs in those kinds of situations, so they need to embrace other parts of themselves and discover what they truly are and show that side to gamers all around the world.

That formed the basis of the orc mindfulness gameplay loop Don’t Kill Them All anchors itself on. Players collect resources to build facilities to help orcs discover their passions and navigate the full spectrum of emotions, which improves their efficacy in battle, which lets them collect more resources. For an orc community, there could scarce be a better form of therapy.