The History & Evolution of Hollow Knight (2014-2018)

For a game that hasn't even been around for two years, Hollow Night seemed to have been the very definition of a sleeper hit, coming from a team of developers with very limited numbers and resources. The success of Hollow Night is a testament to the idea that you don't need a fancy hundred million dollar budget or a team of sixty overworked employees to make your game as entertaining as possible. The Paula Knights Sherry team has consistently demonstrated their generosity and passion for their fan base through a quadrilogy of free content updates featuring fans. art and be as in touch and as open with the game community as your time allows.

I'm rusty and it's time to sit down and outline the full timeline behind how

hollow

Knight became. Let's start by starting with Sherry's first team. a couple of projects, hungry nights and tomb cat, that if we are discussing the

history

of Hollow Knight, we cannot leave out the cherries of the Hungry Knight team. The first project was actually the byproduct of a game the team participated in and for anyone not familiar with the game. Jams are events where smaller development teams will create very simple games that generally have to do with a common theme. Your time is very limited and the development teams that participated in these Jams almost never have time beyond three full days to complete their work. project, so if you're wondering why Hunger Knight and Halle Knight looked completely different in terms of quality, then that's because team Cherry barely had around 48 hours to make this complete game from scratch, the theme of This particular game, Jam was ten seconds long.

Three guys took this team and decided to create a character that needed to be fed every ten seconds, hence the title of the project. Hungry

knight

. As you make your way through a minimally designed wasteland, your

knight

had to stay fed while you fight three. the massive enemies defeat them and collect their masks and return to the shrine you spawned in and you will see the three masks which I assume were the ones that eventually became the three dreamers in Hollow Knight, they have all gathered here at the shrine pointed out by the final. of the game after Jam ended, Team Cherry apparently fell so much in love with the simplicity of the Knights' character design that they eventually decided that the knight should participate as Honest in a much larger project: the second Tomb game was created and developed.

Cat. As part of Indie Speedrun 2013, a game jam event organized by Escapist Tomb Cat magazine was held for this game jam despite missing the deadline, some of the finalists included games like Secret Formula and Platypus Cat. , it's okay, I didn't choose the names, that's how it is. just what came out Game Jam indie speedrun of 2013 decided to focus on the theme of greed and mummies, so immediately the Cherry team decided that an Egyptian-themed project would probably fit with the Tomb Cat vest theme ended up being a game of side scrolling about a tomb robbery. a crypt thief cat named Cara who collected coins and for a limited amount of time, the game had a simple and really effective difficulty curve, the more pyramids you raided and the more levels you completed, the harder the game became and the less time you received for each level.

While these two games are rightly considered extremely important parts of Team Cherry's development

history

, we can actually expand further and talk about what some members of the team were involved in completely outside of the gaming industry. Apple, for example, was a winner. animation studio run by two guys, one of whom you probably recognize, Ari Gibson and Jason Pomona, dedicated themselves to telling animated stories with passion, creativity and heart after relaunching with a new mechanical website in 2012. Apple began releasing updates news and blogs focused on short films. which they were working on next, this included a re-release of one of their early animated shorts Winter Fox, which followed the perspective of a young Fox in the middle of a blizzard trying to find his way back to his family (later , the motorcycle short film animated by the same two people eventually found its way to Disney, where the company even featured the short film as one of Disney's favorites.

The music for motorcycles was composed by a man named Christopher Larkin, with whom many of you. you're probably already familiar with. Christopher is going to get mentioned a lot in this video because Arie didn't know that this animated film would in no way be their last project together and for the next few years it was nothing more than a whirlwind effort for Team Sherry as they They immediately shifted their focus to a project in which they consider their masterpiece Hollow Knight is a traditional side-scrolling game that is anything but traditional, shares the theme of their two previous games and you, as a player, are tasked with exploring a world. strange and really esoteric. world in which you know nothing, but as the game continues, this simple tradition is soon broken and the game begins to develop its own unique qualities.

It's also important to know that Rouen Frazer, while not officially listed as part of Team Cherry on their website, has a critical relationship with Hollow Knight. There are also multiple interviews in which Ari and William actually confirm that he is a member of the team. begin production on the largest project any of them have ever been involved in, at this point the team begins their routine. A new website for the Cherry's team has been launched alongside the reveal of their new Hollow Knight game. The team began their first blog posts by offering virtual walkthroughs through some of their game's most important levels, including King's Pass and The Forgotten Crossroads, the official trailer.

The trailer arrived shortly after and it's important to remember that during the second half of

2014

, Hollow Knight actually began its progress under a more beginner-friendly video game engine called stencil and discontinued it for a good year or so until the Cherry team decided to scrap the game engine and move to unity because it allowed for more content visuals to be added and overall could deliver a much more polished game; in fact, the first trailer was actually footage of the game you were seeing in the template engine, some of its Other early blog posts included a quick rundown of some of the most common enemies you'd see and fight in the Hollowness Realm and in It's actually quite interesting to see how the game's wildlife evolved up to this point because almost all of the names that were used in this previous post would eventually be modified or just changed completely the crawler enemy used to be called snit erinc Rowlett also names like segmented climbing bab and sapien demon and the humming NIT yeah, the primary aspects actually used to be called humming fabrics it's a idk, his wife loved me in particular called the clumsy obelisk, he actually didn't even see past its prototype stage and didn't even make it to the game.

Halle Knight was turning out to be quite a fun project for the team. but it wasn't until they announced their Kickstarter that they realized how seriously fans were taking this project of theirs. Hollow Knight finally gained an overwhelming amount of publicity when the game was picked up by the staff on the Kickstarter website and not soon after. Knight receives the winning vote around November

2014

to be greenlit on Steam. Suddenly, fans started asking questions hungry for more information about the details of the game's inner workings and it was at this point that people really started to take to this project.

Seriously, this was around the time its second trailer, A Strange and Wonderful World, appeared on YouTube, followed by a series of positive announcements about the game's progress, including raising over $60,000 AUD in Kickstarter, the promotion of an official Hollow Knight figure. by David Patron Adopting a new game engine and office upgrade and adding a couple of new team members who would be absolutely critical to the success of Hollow Knight Dave Koz II is an experienced programmer and project manager who the Cherry team he believed it would speed up the game's development and productivity. a level the team had never seen before and with the help of a familiar name, Christopher Larkin, positioned as the lead audio engineer for the game, Hollow Knight seemed to have all the tools necessary to be as innovative as the team wanted it to be.

However, Hollow Night certainly wasn't Christopher's only work during that time and when Team Cherry hired her, he was equally working with another two-dimensional side-scroller called expand and I've linked the website in the description for that as Well, in In case some of you want to go and check out his work, the next big milestone was achieved during the engine change, a particular Unity plugin called Playmaker allowed AI programming to not only be easier to use but surprisingly, It was really expansive. William even posted before on the Team Cherries blog, in fact he loves using it and recommends the plugin for programmers of any experience level, but it's more than just the programming that seemed to have received an update when porting the game assets to Unity , the team realized. how much they could expand on their original concept and how big they could really make this game if they wanted to, they took it as an invitation to add more and more content to the game, more visually appealing details, textures, and a better overall look.

Honestly, the before and after images attached to the blog speak for themselves and it's hugely impressive what a simple change of direction did for the aesthetic of this game not long after the Cherry team released an announcement, one of the most important so far, that their game will be They headed to Pax Australia in October, made new connections, friends, new fans learned about the game and apparently even got to play Cuphead at an earlier point in development, and it was here that they realized that much of the old footage was still being used by multiple media to show off the game, so they fixed that as quickly as they could by unleashing ferocious enemies.

The first trailer for Hollow Night that showed off the gameplay built into the Unity engine. They also announced ghosts and dream warriors in the mix, in addition to many of which they were. designed and written by Kickstarter backers who wanted to see their own creations in the game Marrissa of the Hollow Nest Capital, for example, was one of these creations in early 2016, the team began sharing their updates quite liberally, the pace of news and features increased enormously. As Team Cherry divulged interesting new information about the game's mechanics, such as the charm system, more virtual tours of different areas of the game, such as the white palace, and demonstrated the capabilities of a couple of boss enemies on their blog , one of which was titled The Broken Wanderer, which would eventually be renamed Broken Vessel, as it turns out that developing the weapons and animations for the warrior ghosts actually turned out to be quite an arduous task, and since they became such a component important part of the game, Team Cherry wanted to make sure that some of these bosses really looked like bosses that offered really tough and challenging fights, some of the most challenging in the game, in fact, which was why they decided that these fights would not be necessary to complete. the game; however, they would give you a huge benefit if you wanted to, I don't know, go for a different ending or something, other additions to the game, such as more enemy concept sketches, and even backup implementation on PC like croff and T, written respectively by Noah Storage in T, so Spencer finished.

All of this is also revealed leading into Hollow Knight's final pre-release trailer below and beyond a trailer that showcased some of Hollow Knights' most surreal landscapes, beautiful visuals, and extremely strange supernatural characters the game had to offer as it unfolded. the game concluded. a new face would be added to the Hollow Knight project and the final stages of its production Matt Griffin was arguably the most important asset to Hollow Knight's success, having previously done massive PR and marketing work for other popular games like Stardew Valley Interstellar Area. and wanderlust adventures, an online programmer for Risk of Rain which, by the way, was another game with a brilliant soundtrack.

Matt Griffin really looked like the agent the team needed to get this game noticed. Interviews with the Pixel Rising v1 DLC and The Dimension in Game Informer magazine seemed to be great evidence thatPeople were really getting interested in this game, but it was only when Matt picked up a copy of Holo from the developers' night to day that interest in the game really started to accelerate into the developers' day. you don't know is a one-day event in San Francisco hosted by Double Fine and I am 8-bit that revolves entirely around the prospect of indie games and lesser-known titles.

Double Fine was the team that split from LucasArts years ago and went on to develop Psychonauts Brutal Legend Broken Age and Grim Fandango Remastered just to name a few, so needless to say, drawing a crowd at this convention was a big deal at the same time. long update. Information is also shown about a particular game mode that seems to be giving everyone trouble, not necessarily a new game plus mode, but a much more difficult mode with a modified AU that I'm pretty sure any fan of the game will recognize. This new mode along with other large scale additions to the game really expanded the scope of the final project and the team has even stated that if you are an achievement completionist you may need quite a bit of free time, another GG NPC is introduced around this time and this is combined with a brief description of how exactly the death mechanic works.

He works at Halle Knight and this is where the importance of GG and the tone character lies. Explained a little more clearly, the shadow is the spectral remnant of your night that you leave behind when you die and reconnecting with the shadow is extremely important to progress in the game after the two months leading up to the official release of Hollow Knights, the news only gets bigger and bigger, the Steam page for Hollow Knight goes live, the Switch release for the game is confirmed and the excitement from fans at this point is probably the highest it's ever been.

The team addresses Nintendo Switch concerns and ultimately answers that yes, the game will seek a release on Switch, although at a later date, the game's refinement stage becomes much easier as the team takes advantage of productivity software programs to really flexibles like slack and Trello so that other people testing the game internally can offer suggestions and point out bugs that have otherwise been problematic at launch, one of the biggest and also one of the most controversial complaints was, as As expected, the difficulty of the game. Most people who tried the game expressed concerns about how difficult the game was or if the difficulty of the game was perfect. and it didn't need to be adjusted at all, this resulted in some minor quality of life changes such as increasing spike attack range and the game's linearity, just being less confusing overall.

However, Team Cherry left a couple of things like being able to hit enemies on the other side of walls and stuff because, as they've said before, they prefer not to mess with smaller bugs like this because it allows the player flexibility and they don't think Let it be in place to tell the players how to advance. the game one launch trailer, some backing from the Indy background, and one hundred and forty-nine enemies later, Hollow Knight is live and yes, that number wasn't made up either, they actually confirmed one hundred and forty-nine enemies in the base game, even surpassing in number to the variety of enemies. in Symphony of the Night, the figurehead of the genre and a huge shock to the team as it sold sixty-five thousand copies of that game after just one month, seemed pretty impressive considering the track record of a three-guy team. that went from participating in game jams to immediately jumping into the spotlight on Reddit's front page and having ubiquitously positive reviews written about your game is a huge leap and the rewards only seemed to increase tenfold after the collector's editions of the The game began to be distributed by indie box and there were several merchandise manufacturers who wanted to give Hollow Knight its own line of clothing posters and other physical items that could be purchased outside of the game.

This game had only been out for less than three months at this point and there was already an almost palpable demand for collectibles and other merchandise which, at least in my opinion, is nothing short of remarkable, just to highlight the dedicated passion of this game. fan base. There were already people running this game at a competitive level before the first content update. even 'quickly' made summer games came out in 2017, in fact this was done when Twitch Speedrunner and Steamer Rollin, which at the time gave the game even more publicity than it already had with its overwhelmingly positive reviews, the community It also took its own computers and after just a few months we had fully developed mods like Lightbringer and Glass Sole that could be added to the game.

Team Cherry said in a blog update that having mods made for your game is possibly the greatest honor a game could receive, but if we can backtrack to I just mentioned a little bit about the free content updates for the game and there really aren't any. way to talk about Halle Knight without addressing these updates, so let's go ahead and talk about those hidden dreams that right now were the first free content update for Hollow Knights and after being released just five months after the base game, they really give you gave fans an idea of ​​how quickly and how fervently the team behind this game could really work hidden dreams adds two new bosses a new quality of life mechanic called dream gate that makes backtracking a lot less of a hassle if felt it was necessary to return to an area, the dream gate would prove to be a valuable tool if you didn't want to carry static stations to where you need them, remember when people tried to place a dream gate next to the merchant boy's grave and try of cheating in the flower quest, yes, unfortunately, that didn't work, you know, they thought in advance that the harsh truth was the next update that would be released and with the arrival of even more changes in the game. features new charms and a new quest line where the Hollow Nest was visited by a strange organization of creatures and monsters led by a tall, sinister figure named Grim.

This update had its fair share of new bosses and new challenges, but it seemed very clear that this update was meant to be extremely more significant than the previous new map markers, new powers and abilities, and a new way to get rid of all your annoying geography because you've been building up since the basic release and plenty of assistance from the new music team Cherry. At PAX West, their final push of rewards for Kickstarter backers and more information about a Switch release also seemed to dominate most of their updates, but an announcement they surely couldn't hold onto for long after the grim truth was detailed in the third and last. three content updates, gods and glory now due to a copyright issue, the third content update finally went through a name change to master god.

This was inarguably Team Cherry's largest free contribution to the game since its full release, the final chapter in the Knights' story and in at least in terms of size, a good leader above the previous content packs, five Halls of the Pantheon await your night to fight and there are plenty of new bosses, including the Nail Master, the cunning Nail Sage, a winged version of Nos Jesus-fucking-Christ. and the Pure Vessel, which is presumably the Hollow Knight, only before the infection, the final content pack even teases a new fifth ending involving an altercation between Hornet and a mysterious enemy who is again presumed to be the Hollow Night because the details on the nail are the same. details like the pure ship weapon, but that's irrelevant anyway.

I'm not going to turn this into a war discussion now. It seems like I've skipped a pretty critical update because I mentioned God Master as the third DLC, but I'm only doing that because people are still disagreeing about where exactly the Lifeblood update falls in terms of new content packs versus a standard quality of life update, the Cherry team was already very far into the development of God Master before they realized that an update with some crucial bug fixes was necessary. Definitely necessary, especially for a successful Nintendo Switch launch at the end of June, and in true team fashion, they also couldn't resist adding a couple of new pieces of content along the way.

This update technically had two new bosses if you count the reworked traitor Lord, which is Why are fans so conflicted about whether or not it's technically the third content pack, with God Master being the fourth? I see it as a minor content update because it added a ton of new stuff besides just adding a couple bosses, so I'm all for it. To count it in the rest of the packs, the release of God Master also gave way to the void heart edition released on ps4 and Xbox one, which included these four updates along with the base game for later updates.

Hollow Knight has evolved from the standard platformer. For a masterfully complete game, it really feels big and that's not to say it wasn't huge or exciting to play before, but if you get the void heart edition, which you should because I want to talk to you. I think then playing the main story first is the way to go because seeing Team Cherry's creative

evolution

with these content packs is really something you should experience in the chronologically empty game Knight is the product of years of development and even more years of refinement and maintenance behind the scenes to finally do what I hope with the confirmed and upcoming Hornet DLC is that the Cherry team surprises us even more by implementing what they have learned and really knocking it out of the park more than we thought. it was possible hello, nice hand drawn art style and a story told implicitly.

I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it was certainly mine and is more than worthy of praise. Thanks for tuning in to the forge. I'm rusty and I'll see. next time take care guys