Archive for March, 2009

When I first talked about the Knytt Stories level I’ve been working on — Twisty Little Passages — I mentioned that I wanted to eventually go through it and discuss some of the ideas behind the design and layout of various screens. Initially, I was expecting to leave this discussion on the back burner, but as I thought more about it I realized it might be useful to start it earlier than I planned so that if I received feedback on the level and made changes to it I would have some existing design discussions that I could then compare and contrast with.

I should disclaim that I do not intend to suggest that this Knytt Stories level is profound in any sense, but instead I hope that sharing the thought process behind the level will encourage others to do the same and perhaps provide useful insights about what may (or may not) be useful to others building levels in a similar format. Also, reading these discussions will clearly expose you to spoilers about the level progression — though at the beginning the level is largely linear, so not very much will be a surprise anyway — if you are interested in playing through the level when it is complete, however, you might want to avoid later discussions (I will try to indicate any discussions that include what I would consider major game-play or puzzle spoilers).

So, without further introduction, here is a design walkthrough of the first 7 screens of Twisty Little Passages:

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I’ve taken the recent launch of Microsoft’s XBox Live Community Games as a signal that I should buckle down a bit and focus on a single project to take from concept to completion. I won’t say I’ve stopped fiddling with other projects and experiments (since, obviously, building a Knytt level is not a key step in completing a game for the XBox360…), but I have bent most of my major development efforts towards one relatively straightforward project lately. The project I’ve been working on was in close competition with a second one for a while, but ultimately won out simply because the level design requirements are much less finicky; the second project is still next on my list, and I plan to post about it here soon as part of this series of updates I promised.

Today, though, I want to offer an overview of Orc. To make things more interesting for you, and to express something about the spirit of the game, I will provide the information from the point of view of both a run-of-the-mill human being, and a mighty battle-hardened orc:

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I owe this site some attention, so this will be the first in a series of small updates mentioning some of the projects I’ve been tinkering with lately…

Lately I’ve been browsing through the Let’s Play Archive, which is worthier pasttime than it sounds like it might be, and I happened to come across the Let’s Play of Knytt and Knytt Stories. I’d played Knytt Stories in the past, but seeing the Let’s Play had me in the mood for another run-through, so I … sauntered? what is the right verb for “went to a website in no particular hurry”? … well, in any case I downloaded Knytt Stories again. This time though, I decided to put some time and effort into the editor that comes with it as well. (The first time through I was too busy with real life to invest the time in it… but with the economy and all, real life is less compelling now.)

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