At the finale, though, players would be ready to face it. They’d considered suspending these blocks above a void, causing an instant death if the player fell off, but figured it’d be too difficult at that stage in the game. Then they thought about the Plague Knight boss fight, which takes place on top of a line of blocks which Plague Knight can destroy. “But whenever we talked about it it didn’t seem very exciting to anyone,” he says, a little ruefully. But that’s as much as they’d planned until the last few months before the game was released, when D’Angelo pitched the idea of some kind of auto-scroller in which the player had to destroy processions of blocks as they tried to near the Enchantress. They also wanted her to be floating around the stage. The game is called Shovel Knight, after all. So, the first time they designed the Enchantress, Yacht Club figured the battle had to be about digging. As D’Angelo says, “When you get to the final boss, we’re giving you the main theme of the game as much as possible, so you feel, ‘Oh yeah, this is what it’s about.’” While all Shovel Knight’s other bosses zero in on a specific aspect of the game, stretching your skills in different directions, the Enchantress was always going to do more. And now the project is finally done, these four riffs on the same battle are a chance to witness a studio jamming on and exploring the nooks and crannies of its design. But the real challenge began when they went back to redesign her another three times, once for each of the game’s expansions. Here, Yacht Club faced the challenge of producing a fight with the same restriction of four attacks and 20 hit points as all the other bosses, while also acting as a striking culmination of the adventure. So its bosses naturally follow classic rules, too, including its final one, the Enchantress. It has to stay true to its inheritance, else, as programmer and co-designer David D’Angelo tells me, “It’d stand out as bizarre.” Shovel Knight can’t fill the screen with 1000 bullets or radically switch up how it plays. When Yacht Club Games decided to style Shovel Knight after the NES games that inspired it, they took that project seriously. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |