With Kill Knight, PlaySide Studios has stepped into the console (and PC) space with a compelling and challenging high score-chasing, twin-stick shooter. We already gave you , but we also spent a day at one of PlaySide Studios’ Melbourne offices, chatting with the team about their goals for the game and getting the inside track on how it changed over the course of development. Here are some of the most interesting insights that Ryan McMahon (General Manager of PlaySide’s PC and Console Games Division) and Sean Gabriel (Lead Game Designer on Kill Knight) told us during our visit.
Kill Knight is an ultra-responsive, arcade-inspired isometric action shooter and, funnily enough, that is the one line pitch that [Lead Game Designer] Sean came into this with when we first started development. So that isn't our tagline [that] we're saying now; it’s straight from the original pitch before we started development and we've maintained that..
. throughout the entire development. It’s been that one liner that the team’s always come back to when we're trying to determine the art style.
.. or we're talking about the music, or we're talking about how the game should feel to play.
That's what Sean and his team have always brought things back to. Is this that arcadey feel that we want, or is it responsive enough? What's the frame rate? Staying true to all those goals is essentially what that line says about the game, and it's something that they set out as the vision from the very beginn.