Welcome to this series of development blogs for The Knightling around the launch of the game! Through this blog, we want to take you through the ideation, pre-production and production of Twirlbound’s latest open world action adventure game, launching on PC and consoles August 28th.
Context of the blog
During the making of our previous game ‘Pine’, we had a consistent development blog running for almost 2 years. It was great fun writing those as they also functioned as a content round-up for ourselves at the end of every week, but they also took a lot of time to create. And maybe more importantly, it meant that we were developing ‘out in the open’, sharing a lot of our iterative work, which can lead to information being shared that might be outdated by the time the game comes out.
For The Knightling, we felt like we should try to develop a bit more ‘behind closed doors’ for the start of it. From a development perspective, it was a welcome calmness after the stormy launch of Pine. From a publishing perspective, it also allows for a bit more freedom to talk to publishers and platform holders as we’re not announcing anything yet in the first phases (like we were with the Pine Kickstarter).
Evolving after Pine
As Pine was nearing completion, which was a 5-year endeavor that started as a graduation project, we had a core team of 7 people, aching to make something new and fresh.
Pine is extremely ‘systems-heavy‘, meaning the core loop and a lot of the gameplay was governed by systems, in particular the simulation we had going on. We spent a lot of time on getting that right – dynamic villages, the quests listening to the needs and goals of the species, etc. – and that meant we spent less time on the moment-to-moment gameplay such as traversal and combat. We had the urge to do something more with that.
Pine is also very grounded in its themes, colors, etc. – and we felt like doing something more playful. Lastly, after the introduction quests in Pine, the game opens up quite quickly, allowing the player to go anywhere. This was pretty cool but also meant that had we had limited means of player progression and guiding the player to increasingly cool things. We wanted to make something that was still open but a bit more guided, perhaps through player mechanic unlocks, for the next game.
If you now look at The Knightling, we think both things still hold true – a focus on playful movement and combat, a guided main quest experience through multiple varied regions and a very colorful and adventurous setting!
Only a shield
The initial idea of The Knightling came from a very simple statement:
Inspired by games like 2018’s God of War, where the grand scale of the game is supported by a very focused set of gameplay mechanics all surrounding the legendary axe, we wanted to make something quite focused. The thought of not having to deal with a lot of weapon/gear options was very appealing to us, and the creativity of all the things you could do with a shield immediately sparked a lot of creativity.
- For movement, the shield’s shape and affordances hold a lot of interesting possibilities: sledding, paddling, using it as a glider, bolting a propeller on top…
- For combat, there’s a great variety of expectations we can subvert – so many games have the shield as a secondary tool, focusing on melee weapons, so what happens if we take that out of the equation?
- For story, our minds very quickly drifted to a squire, a shield-bearing character we could tell a great underdog story around.
We quickly started experimenting with different prototypes of gameplay mechanics using only a shield. The shield slide was an instant win:
However, combat was a bit trickier. We tried to stick to passive combat for a bit, whereby you would charge the shield when it gets impacts and you could unleash that energy when building up enough, but the simple fact was that waiting for enemy actions was not as fun as performing actions yourself.
One feature we wanted to borrow from Pine is making sure that the player always has both a melee and ranged tool available, so that we could fit our content to either and mix and combine interesting scenarios. The shield throw was born, taking inspiration from Captain America and (again) 2018’s God of War:
Weight of the shield
One mechanic that was not working out as we intended is quite interesting to mention: we played with the idea that the shield had a certain weight, and if you would throw it, you would be lighter. Certain actions were connected to this state: double jumping was only available without the shield, you would run faster, etc. However:
- Players were just throwing the shield away constantly to be faster and double jump; it was never a strategic choice, just a decision for comfort
- Ideas surrounding not having the shield seemed cool at first, but obviously we wanted to play with the design and features of the shield as much as possible, so it should be used sparingly.
Bad ideas apparently do exist!
Tools and tooling
While we were building the shield as our main tool for the player, there was a lot of backbone we wanted to refresh from building Pine. Creating open worlds for third person character controllers with a small team is quite the challenge, but we were happy and proud to have figured out how to do it for Pine. Things like the terrain system, NPC systems, inventories, quests, etc. had a good base, but we wanted to iterate on it to make sure we could use a more robust set of tools for not just The Knightling, but also projects after.
We decided to make the jump to an ECS-based architecture so that we could put the power of developing content in the hands of our designers and artists, while keeping a lot of control over the efficiency. Quite a change of mindset, but a very fun challenge. We built a large set of tools within Unity that we could label as ‘Twirlbound packages’, that we can now use for other projects, for things like inventory, questing, logic editing, sequencing (like combat moves and cinematics) and more.
It was a huge time investment but it paid off!
Strong foundation – now what?
At this point, Pine had launched to some success for us and we knew we could keep going. A little pandemic hit the world, things got weird – but we carried on patching and updating Pine, porting it to PlayStation and redoing the Nintendo Switch port, all the while prototyping The Knightling further. We were going to start working on a demo and a Creative Europe subsidy application to get this project off the ground!
The demo we were going to work on would have to showcase the shield mechanics, a bit of the worldbuilding, the questing/dialogue/narrative systems, the combat systems… All while building the tools alongside it. Quite a heavy challenge, but we were excited about not only the concept, but also what the experience of making a more playful and linear game this time around would bring us.
In the following blogs we’ll talk more about how we got from that early, dark-hooded figure to the Knightling we all know and love today… and the one we can all play as on August 28th!
