PlaySide Studios on Kill Knight

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 our thoughts after extensive hands-on time with the game, 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.

The Eldritch Layer Pitch

Ryan McMahon: 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 beginning.

Sean Gabriel: You’ve got the one half [of the game], [where] it’s an obvious power fantasy, right? It’s one of those games where we want you to feel awesome – you’re a badass guy, you’re fighting demons, [it’s] a straight-up power fantasy… But then the other thing is through the lens of this game and this genre, and top-down in general, it’s dominated [by] Diablo, ARPGs, inventories, builds, all that sort of crazy knowledge stuff. Whereas… we wanted this to bring back that arcade [sensibility] of – we’re actually going to bombard you with all this stuff, and if you love the aesthetic enough, and we can draw you into this world and get you immersed. We’re going to bring you along on this journey to make you so good at the game that the power fantasy that you see? We’re going to get you there and, once you’re there, you just have that blending of the power fantasy and your actual skill. You can’t really beat that in terms of that sense of accomplishment. That sense of, ‘Okay, I’m actually The Kill Knight; I’m doing this.’ If we had made the mechanics simpler or made it a bit too accessible in terms of the things you need to learn to get up there, you just wouldn’t have that full connection.

Ryan McMahon: It’s not a game where if I play more and grind more I get more XP, or I get more equipment that’s going to make me better at the game. The experience that you gain is you as a player getting more mastery of the game, and it’s very much a game that rewards mastery.

Difficulty and Unlocks

Ryan McMahon: This game is all about… making the player feel powerful… and the way you do that is you make it very push-forward focused. So your player never stands still; you’re constantly trying to build that momentum and maintain it. And when you get things right and you have that momentum, it feels super satisfying, so we’re constantly… rewarding aggression, rewarding precision. The game has four distinct difficulty settings, so when we’re talking about the game being hard, it doesn’t have to be super hard. You can start on the lowest difficulty and work your way up and we reward the player for working their way up those difficulties by multiplying their score.

Sean Gabriel: All of the equipment is gated around learning all the mechanics. So, keeping your [kill] streak high, utilising specific pieces of equipment in an interesting way, etcetera. The whole game is teaching you while you’re playing through, just wanting to unlock all the cool stuff… you have to trust the game. We’re going to get you there and we do it in all these different ways.

Ryan McMahon: Unlocking those weapons changes things a little bit. So if you unlock new pistols it changes the active reload response to those pistols as well. If you unlock a new heavy weapon it also changes the wrath blast that you get when you use that heavy weapon. If you get a new sword it changes the active reload you get when you use your sword on the active reload… all the mechanics stay the same but the reaction to those mechanics from the weapon you’ve chosen changes with it.

When you get to the end of the game there is a boss you fight, the Last Angel, and that is the ‘final’ encounter in the game. Once you defeat the Last Angel you unlock two things – Sever mode, which is a special mode where layers 1 to 5 are condensed into one super level, combining all five layers… Every single level has also been revisited in this mode… It’s intense the whole way through.

The second thing you unlock is a new difficulty mode called Sufferance. So if you really like suffering, which you probably do if you’ve made it to the end where you’ve beaten the boss, [you can] go back through all the levels and play on the hardest difficulty and then get an even higher score because that’s the hardest difficulty you get.

Sean Gabriel: Yeah, it can get pretty tough, but I think there is a yearning for games that demand a little bit more from you, and get you to come to them a bit. There’s a yearning for that from gamers, and that’s what we leveraged.

The cool thing about our difficulty modes too, is a lot of games… [they] just bloat the health [on enemies], you know, just to make it harder. But we had to find some creative ways to make it challenging, while also viable for the leaderboards, while also not breaking our mechanics and the timings that you’ve inherently learned after smashing your head against one layer for ages. [Increasing the difficulty] doesn’t increase the health [of enemies]. It does increase things like their speed, spawn times, distances, damage [taken]… We have a couple of pieces of equipment that you have to get on the higher difficulties, which is interesting.

An Alien Arcade Machine

Ryan McMahon: Atmosphere was a very big thing for making Kill Knight… and a lot of that is done through not just the visuals, but also the music, the audio-scape of the game, all those things coming together create the tone which is Kill Knight, which is intense, surreal, suppressive, oppressive, demanding, everything’s very overwhelming…

[Sean] did a whole brief at one point about it being an alien arcade machine. Imagine if we went to Mars and found an arcade machine – what game would we play? That was a whole thing the team was talking about for a while. But that atmosphere piece, even in the UI, how the UI glitches in, has that CRT monitor effect and everything. All those things are super intentional in creating that tone from the moment you boot up the game, that glitchy alien arcade sound effect when you boot up, it’s put in front of you from the very start, the music that plays when you first boot up, the spawn effect when you jump in, the music that kicks off, the noises of the enemies as they first spawn, all those things are very intentional in setting up that tone.

Sean Gabriel: It was probably about halfway through the project, there was an epiphany moment… we were aiming for this dark, brutal – it’s like top-down Dark Souls… oppressive, angry, and then just where the project was moving, where the art style was moving, we were introducing more colours, as the game mechanics were coming up, we’re like, ‘Okay, we need purple here, red here, blue here.’ And we started thinking, ‘…this needs to be more vibrant. This needs to be more alien. This needs to be more something that you look at and it looks fun…’ And that’s that half-half [aspect], where it’s half… this grim, dark, fully atmospheric thing but also – we’re playing an alien arcade game. Let’s live in that a bit. Let’s have fun with that.

The art style came… very quickly… ‘deep fried pixels’, [the team] call it. I reckon that’s so awesome. And that brutalist serious architecture, with the deep fried pixels, with the almost jester-like character Kill Knight. It all started clicking together.

Kill Knight’s Gameplay Evolution

Sean Gabriel: We originally started with [the idea] it was going to be a mostly melee game, and then we quickly learned that we wanted the tempo faster… and we had it pretty fast [already]. It was pretty fun – but [we] realised very quickly, maybe in the first month or two, that – wait a minute, no, we need guns. This needs to aesthetically be knights with guns. Because that’s just inherently cool, inherently ridiculous, and that’s just Kill Knight as an aesthetic. Cool and also ridiculous and immersive, and the guns increases the tempo… you can swap between shotgun and this and that and we bring in the melee as a utility, and you’ve got to start using the sword more because that’s how you get your heavy weapon ammo back and other things like that. And so that was kind of the kernel of it. I don’t want to say top-down Doom Eternal because it came from a rich history of ideas… [but that descriptor] isn’t a bad one, either.

We came to the layer stuff probably about halfway through the project, because initially it was going to be an adventurous exploration, speedrunning from end to end kind of game… like a dungeon run. We had this idea that you’re exploring as you’re fighting. But we realised that what we were doing was just making an arena that you were contained in, [then a] corridor, [then an] arena that you’re contained in, corridor, arena. We’re basically building eight arenas and we have this Escher art style. And we have this ‘everything is shifting’ abyss… what if we just sort of stacked it, and then it shifts and then shifts again and shifts again? Do we even need you to have any downtime? And that was another big thing – we didn’t want any downtime. We just wanted you to go, go, go and we felt that these like traversal points [created downtime, so]… what if we didn’t have any of that as a problem? And we just stacked it on top of each other, how’d that feel? And that was a big epiphany, ‘Oh, we can just maintain the momentum the entire time.’

A very important part of the game was having no fluff – it’s a fluffless game. Everything’s important, everything’s meaningful, you have to use everything. To be good at the game, you can and should have to use everything. That naturally led to being inspired by all these different games like Doom Eternal, Hyper Demon, where you’ve got that rhythm, you’ve got that flow state. All the mechanics have to flow into one another…

Kill Knight’s Equipment

Sean Gabriel: The really important pillar we had for equipment was we wanted no fluff, no nonsense… being an arcade game, being a score chasing game, we wanted every bit of equipment to be viable. Viable in terms of getting high scores.

Also, in terms of the equipment, we wanted to support a few different play styles, obviously. Are you more defensive plus back? Are you more aggressive plus forward? Are you a bit more tactical? Do you have the mental ability to manage different things and you want to do that? So we wanted to have allowances for that. We wanted allowances for mindless pure damage – plough through. We wanted to support all those things, but the big challenge was making everything viable.

But being a top-down game, we also wanted to have a bit of an expression of games that have come before us. So you’ve got your [Assault] Android [Cactus], you’ve got your Ruiner, you’ve even got Cannon Spike, which is this way old Dreamcast game, [plus] all these punch ’em ups. We wanted to pay tribute a bit to a lot of different games, and have this big spread of equipment to use, so a few of the weapons are just straight up homages to some different things that people might go, ‘Oh wait, that’s from that!’

The Active Reload System

Sean Gabriel: We were exploring equipment, we were exploring our depth of combat. Some things were landing, others weren’t fully. And we just kept pushing on giving the player more things to do in the micro, rather than just the macro. I’ll put it like this: whenever you pause the game, this could go in a bunch of different directions in the next one to two seconds in terms of the microdecision making. Do you dash out of the way and get a better position? Do you sword reload? Do you pistol reload? It was a real push to create that freeze frame depth. When I freeze the game, I want to be able to have a snapshot and go, ‘Whoa, how many different things can I do?’ Because that’s kind of like playing these games in a nutshell, right? That’s what your brain is doing every second. It’s these microdecision making points.

And that was really important to increase that combat depth. That [idea that] your run is different from my run; no run’s the same. And there’s so much potential for skill expression. So that’s where the active reload came from. We want[ed] that little bit of skill… that rhythm skill, but [also]… how can we build player expression into the active reload? And so you’ve got the three different reloads, but then even all the equipment have different things that they do. Then you can see that you’re hitting more of that depth again, and that combat player expression. We want you to be dancing as the Kill Knight. And that’s all ticking the overall goal, which is immersion.

That level of immersion was really important to us because we knew we had a hard game. We wanted you to really feel that. And so it was intentional to have that immersive quality so that when the game gets challenging and when it’s getting frustrating, you’re feeling, ‘Okay, I want to get right back in there.’

Layers of Lore

Ryan McMahon: You play as the Kill Knight… [a] knight who’s been condemned to eternal sufferance, deep within the voids of an Eldritch arena set below Hell itself.

Sean Gabriel: What’s deep in the lore is [that] each layer’s kind of like a psychological phase that the Kill Knight as a character is going through. You’ve got the stages of grief and you’ve got things like Dante’s Inferno. And so we’re thinking – okay, what’s this step-by-step process that you as a character would be going through when you’ve basically been given this mission to save the world that is practically impossible? And also possibly you’re the bad guy. And there is no escape. Humanity has pushed you into this thing and it’s completely unfair and you don’t want to do it, and you’re very reluctant, but you’ve been here for years and years and years doing this. What are the psychological stages you’d go through?

I won’t get into it too much but we start with Solitude as the first layer because you have this sense of abandonment. You’re alone in this new space. And then Entanglement. Now you’re entangled with the world and you’re stuck down here. This is characterised by thorns and even in the gameplay a lot of the things start slowing you down and trapping you a lot more. Traps start being introduced. And then you’ve got Viscera, which is this red, bloody zone… he’s sort of mentally cutting the idea that he’s ever going to have any life other than this… and then you’ve got Echelon and Reflection.

I really felt strongly [that we needed] to bake it with some themes that people that do get immersed in it have something to grab onto. We have no narrative or exposition… so there needs to be that textural undertone that you can grab onto. It was really important for all our artists too, for all the artists to have something tangible [to anchor them].

The Last Angel

Sean Gabriel: You’re in this ‘end of humanity’ sort of cycle. You’ve got these characters called Kill Knights, which are essentially sentinels that the last of humanity’s training and power has been imbued into. This… was a very angelic world, deep in humanity’s past. But something happened – which we can explore at some point – all the angels betrayed humanity… [and now there’s] this abyssal keep where all these horrible creatures are coming out and destroying the earth again because all the angels have left and… there’s no protection.

Kill Knight is out now on PC, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox.

Cam Shea is the former editor-in-chief of IGN AU, and now spends most of his time immersed in Australia’s craft beer scene.