Knytt Stories – Twisty Little Passages

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.)

The whole experience of building a Knytt Stories level is an exercise in (by modern mainstream standards anyway) brutal minimalism. A level is divided into screens, which snap (rather than smoothly scroll), each screen is relatively small, and limited to really quite a minimal collection of tiles that need to be laid out on just a handful of layers. There’s no support at all for any sort of scripting or direct manipulation of the world during the game (some effects can be managed by warping the player from one copy of a particular screen to another, based on very simple conditions), objects and hazards have rigid and fairly straightforward behaviors (many of which impose constraints on the layout of the screens on which they appear), and the behavior of the player and the powerups you can provide for them is entirely fixed. It’s all a wonderful exercise in learning about how little you actually need to be able to build something interesting.

So Knytt Stories level editing has been my in-between activity lately; when I take a break from coding one project or another (or, on the bad days, from doing “real work”), I put together a screen or two. Since I now have a fair number of screens strung together into something at least vaguely cohesive (though entirely unplanned ahead of time), I thought it might be fun to share.

Below you’ll find a few screenshots from the level (bear in mind all the artwork for these screens comes from Knytt Stories — I did not suddenly grow an artistic bit of my brain or anything — I just slapped the tiles together):

And if you’d like you can run around the level by downloading this file:

/downloads/knytt/The Wasabi Project – Twisty Little Passages – Playtest 2009-03-09.knytt.bin

Of course, you’ll want (and need) to go download Knytt Stories as well:

http://nifflas.ni2.se/index.php?main=02Knytt_Stories&sub=03Download
If you do decide to give it a try, please bear in mind it’s an unfinished little hobby project — you may have no fun at all, and it is entirely possible to fall off the edge of the map and plunge indefinitely into the void. Eventually I’ll probably fix that, but there’s no particular timetable for doing so!

I’d like to eventually take advantage of the time and effort spent building this (partial) level to walk through it bit by bit as well and discuss it as I go, but I admit that’s not the top of the priorties list at the moment.