Lock it down & Make it shine

I am working every waking minute to finish A Knight Never Yields and release it before end of this year. But as I am heading to Prague for my day job, I decided to post few tidbits from behind the scenes to show you what`s cooking. Let`s take a look.

Feature lockdown

In every game's development there comes a time where you have to stop adding features. This is called feature lockdown and I am at this very stage. No more features are going to be added beyond this point and now every effort is focused on tuning and polishing the game as a whole.

Last feature I added came from a community suggestion. After a test session, I got a feedback that some sort of information where the player currently is in blind mode would be nice. I thought about it for few days and decided to create a simple prototype of a feature that would track progress of player in blind mode.

And instantly, it clicked. This was feature that was missing a lot in the game. So I quickly converted the prototype into full feature which you can see in the gif below.

Developing story

Right after my very first prototype of this game, after I decided I want to make it into full game, I knew I want to tell a story. I had a rough idea even back then which only grew as time passed. I wanted to make it deeply personal, yet at the same not disconnected from the world around it.

If everything succeeds (who knows, I am a louzy writer) the story should explain everything from our hero to the strange castle he is currently in. And the blind mechanic has a crucial part in the story as well.

At this moment I have a roadmap of the story beats and where they should happen. Now it`s all about writing the dialog between The Kid (main protagonist) and Shrouded Man (guide) which will convey the story itself.

Polishing

I would say that polishing makes or breaks the game. Even if you have rock solid core of the game with engaging mechanics, it could still fall flat if the final presentation is clunky and full of sharp edges. You can look past it and enjoy the game for what it is but it feels... incomplete - even though the game is technically complete.

Last few weeks I am mainly focusing on polishing - adding sounds to buttons, making menu responsive, giving little particle effects here and there, finetuning lighting... I could go on. These are very minor things you won`t notice, but would stick out as a sore thumb if they weren`t there.

The good and bad thing about polishing is that you could do it forever. Always adding small detail here, tiny sound effect there.... At some point I need to stop and be satisfied with what`s in the game. This will happen probably a week or two from release date, we shall see. But for now, everything must shine!

What`s next?

In upcoming days and weeks it will be time to connect everything to Steam - implement Steam SDK into the game and make Achievements work with Steam. Everything is ready, I just need to plug it in. It looks easy, hopefully it will be. But then again, it's 2020, so...

I also want to localize into few languages - Czech (as it`s my native language), probably German and French too. I know of