Hey everyone, it’s been another successful sprint on the Knighty Night Development team. We have completed a lot this sprint and we are excited to share our progress with you guys!

Implementing Audio and Video Settings:

Along with all the fun stuff we are creating we also need to make some standard things like settings for the game. So we have started implementing adjustable audio and video settings so players can adjust the game to how they would like to play.

We are also currently working on setting up for future audio implementation. We are putting in temporary sounds and setting up a full audio manager, so in the future, we can add in all the sounds that we would like for the game. We intend on adding many more sounds to the game to fully bring the game to life.

More Bosses!

The programming team has also finished up the bosses for the cathedral and the graveyard levels. I don’t want to show off exactly what they do in the spirit of keeping it a bit of a surprise until they are fully implemented into the game. But here is a little sneak peek of what the graveyard boss room looks like. You might be able to get a little bit of an idea of what the boss does based on the number of traps in the room…

New Mini Game Progress:

Programming has also started working on some new mini-games for Knighty Night. We haven’t decided exactly how we are going to introduce them/give them to the player yet but they should be a lot of fun. We are planning on doing some fun takes on some retro games from the past, with a Knighty Night twist! We’re not going to show anything for this quite yet but wanted to give you guys some insight into what we’re working on. We’ll be showing some more on this soon!

Graveyard Level Testing and Iteration:

We have been doing internal playtesting and iterating on the graveyard levels ever since we have gotten the base mechanics from programming and have been improving them. The new mechanics for the levels have been implemented and the layouts are finalized for the most part.

In the original level layouts players could enter from the back of rooms which made the level feel confusing or made the player feel lost, so we cut out a lot of entering from the back of rooms.

Also in the original levels players skipped rooms because they could pick from multiple paths which made the levels feel much shorter and players were missing out on rooms that weren’t along the path they chose.

We have now made it so many of those rooms are along the path of the player, so they get to experience more of the content in the game and make the levels feel more difficult because there's multiple obstacles for the player to overcome to complete the level.

We then went ahead and added more dead ends within the level to go along with the new mechanic in the game, this makes the levels a little bit more maze-like.

Lastly, the level design team and I are starting on the art pass of the levels. This should fill the scene more and bring the levels to life. Many of the assets that I have been showing off in previous sprints, will be seen in these graveyard levels.

New Game VFX:

We have also created a few visual effects to spruce up the game a bit and make the world of Knighty Night feel more lived in and full.

We created was this cauldron effect, this is to help the spooky/dark ambiance of the graveyard levels.

New Graveyard and Cathedral Assets:

As usual, our awesome art team has been producing a lot of the assets for our levels. So here I’ll show you all the art that they produced in this last sprint! Many of them are environmental props for the new graveyard levels but we also got some props done for the cathedral level too.

These are some new environment props that can be used not only to decorate the levels but are also going to be essential in guiding and grounding the player so they don’t get lost or confused.

This is the door that will signify to the player that they have reached the end of the level. We’ll likely add a visual effect to also make it clear that the player has reached the end of the level.

As I mentioned earlier we also got a bunch of assets created for the cathedral. Here is a look at what has been created so far.

Many of these assets will be used to fill the scene and make it feel like they are traversing through a cathedral but should also still emulate the style and feel of Knighty Night.

Loading Art:

Our 2D artist made a cute little loading animation to show when a level is loading in game. This will replace our awesome temp art but it should look really good in game.

Health Rework/Update:

We wanted to rework the heart system that was previously in the game because it wasn’t super clear how much of a heart you had if you had taken a quarter heart of damage. We want the player to be able to glance at their health and instantly know how much health they have, so we wanted to make this even clearer.

The first thing we did was create a new style for the hearts that would allow us to segment the heart into four pieces. So you know each stage of health you are at.

The way the health will now work is that your helmet will go first, then the metal border around your heart, then the player will have a basic heart and then a half heart. This should hopefully signify losing pieces of armor to the player and then sacrificing actual health.

Tons of New Animations:

Our animators really killed it this sprint and got a bunch of animations done for the game. I’ll post all the animations made this sprint below and I’ll label each animation with a subtitle of what it’s for.

New Ghlost Enemy Animation

Deacon Albert Spawning Ghlosts Tell

Boss Dazed Tell

Ghlost Knockback Animation

Ghlost Death Animation

Deacon Albert Spin Tell

Ghlost Transformation Animation

These animations should help in a variety of ways, many of them are to add life and flavor to the game. However, some of these are to make it clear to the player what an enemy or boss is doing, especially in animation tells for the bosses. This should help the player react to what the boss is doing.

That is all the work we got done this sprint! I hope you guys are enjoying the progress that we are making on the game and I look forward to sharing more of our progress soon. We should have a major update soon.

Keep checking here for continued updates on the progress of the game!

Thanks,

The Knighty Night Development Team