Hollow Knight’s origin story goes all the
way back to August 2013, when two friends from Australia decided to enter a game jam
together. Ari Gibson, a skilled animator, and William
Pellen, an all-round designer, first met each other through mutual friends about 10 years
before development on Hollow Knight began. William used to be a web designer, but always
had a passion for video games, so he started making games in his spare time. He made his first game called Return To Booty
Grotto in October 2012 and published it on newgrounds.com. After that, he made another game the next
year called Lulanda, which he developed with Stencyl, a tool designed to make games quick
and easy. Just like Return To Booty Grotto, Lulanda
can still be played on Newgrounds today. William had plans to turn his 2D platformer
into a fully fledged game, but he ran into technical issues since his game was getting
too big for the software to handle. When William realized he would have to move
to a different engine to keep the development going, he decided to let go of the project. While William was getting more familiar with
game development, Ari was keeping himself busy with a wide variety of animation projects. He worked for the People’s Republic of Animation
and was involved with TV, short movies, commercials and video games. For example, Ari directed a cutscene for the
Wii game “de blob”. In 2012 he co-founded his own animation studio
named Mechanical Apple and produced several award winning animations. After being friends for many years and sharing
a love for video games, especially Zelda 2, William and Ari agreed to join forces and
started participating in game jams together. Game jams are an excellent way for developers
to flex their skills and test their durability against stress, since you only have a very
limited amount of time to complete and submit a game. In August of 2013 the 27th edition of Ludum
Dare was held, a game jam community that’s been around since 2002. Before Ari and William decided to enter, they
invited Rohan Fraser, a talented artist that Ari knew through work, to join their team. These three developers formed the original
members of Team Cherry. The theme for the 27th edition of Ludum Dare
was “10 seconds” and although Team Cherry was able to successfully create a game within
the allotted time, it was arguably not very good. Hungry Knight was a simple top-down survival
game where you had to slay insect-looking creatures and collect cherries every 10 seconds,
otherwise the player character would perish. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t very stable
and was plagued with frame drops. When the team published Hungry Knight on the
Newgrounds website, it received a user rating of one out of five stars. The predecessor to Hollow Knight is still
playable today and nowadays the game has a user rating of four out of five stars. Even though Team Cherry didn’t win the Ludum
Dare game jam and gamers didn’t seem to connect much to their first creation, Hungry
Knight did lay the foundation for what was about to become a highly successful indie
game. Especially Ari’s compelling artstyle was
something the team wanted to further explore. Before they would start development on Hollow
Knight, Team Cherry took on two more game jams. About a month after Ludum Dare, the three
developers participated in the Indie Speedrun 2013 game jam and the theme this time around
was “wealth”, while their element was chosen to be “mummy”. Although they weren’t able to finish their
game Tomb Cat in time for the game jam’s deadline, Team Cherry still finished and published
it on Newgrounds. The next Ludum Dare game jam took place in
April 2014 with the theme that year being “Beneath the Surface”, a theme that would
shape and refine the groundwork for Hollow Knight. Around the same time, Ari couldn’t stop
thinking about Hungry Knight and the protagonist they had created. Therefore, the small indie studio decided
to combine Hungry Knight with the “Beneath the Surface” theme and it turned out to
be a perfect match. “Shortly after Ludum Dare there was another
jam with the theme ‘Beneath the Surface,’ which we thought was really evocative. We missed the deadline for the jam, but we
kept talking about what sort of game we could make that would fit. We thought of the little insect knight exploring
a deep, old kingdom beneath the surface of the world, and everything kinda snowballed
from there.” Not long after, Ari and William decided to
quit their jobs and go all in with developing their first official video game. For the next couple of months, Ari and William
were fully devoted to their new project and worked hard to get a proof of concept of the
ground. Ari would take on the role of the game’s
art supervisor, while William would oversee the game’s overall design. The title Hungry Knight was originally chosen
because the character needed to eat cherries every ten seconds, but since that wasn’t
part of their new idea anymore, they decided to change it to Hollow Knight. When it came to choosing what engine to use,
Team Cherry decided to take the Lulanda prototype that William had made with Stencyl and adapted
it to fit their needs for Hollow Knight. Both Ari and William knew they had to focus
on the moment-to-moment mechanics first and this involved getting the movement of the
player character just right. “We wanted players to feel totally in control
of their character at all times, so our model for movement was the Megaman and Megaman X
series. The Knight has no acceleration or deceleration
on horizontal movement. The jump has a lot of initial lift, releasing
the button cuts vertical speed quickly, and the dash completely arrests vertical movement,
shooting you forward instantly. Any hit they take or mistake they make could
have been avoided right up until the last second. It’s a principle we tried to roll out through
the rest of the game – but it all started with the Knight’s run and jump, the very
first things to be coded.” After the pair was satisfied with the Knight’s
movements, they directed their attention to the theme that sparked it all: the place beneath
the surface. Ari and William had this idea for a mysterious
kingdom that had fallen from grace, which ended up becoming Hallownest. The game is heavily inspired by the Metroidvania
genre and in those games one of the key elements is the map, so naturally designing the world
of Hollow Knight became a major focus for the indie studio. However, they wanted to set it apart from
other Metroidvania games and this became the most difficult design challenge throughout
the whole development. “The map and the mapping system took a long
while to come together. We wanted players to feel like an explorer
entering uncharted lands, so we knew that the map couldn’t work in a Metroid-style
way. It couldn’t know the shape of the landscape
before the player did, but it also couldn’t be so unfriendly that a player would turn
off the game in frustration.” Their solution was to implement an NPC character
that sells parts of the map, while also letting players expand the map themselves as they
keep exploring. When the two developers figured out how to
approach the map system from a mechanical standpoint, they still needed to make it visually
appealing. The map in Hollow Knight almost looks like
a maze, but Team Cherry was able to find a good balance between suggesting enough information
and not overwhelming the player with details. To further emphasize a sense of discovery
and exploration, the team focused on giving the player interesting things to stumble on
such as hidden characters, treasures, and battles. A common criticism of Metroidvania games is
the large amount of backtracking that’s required. Players often have acquired more abilities
at that point, making earlier areas in those games much easier and might cause the overall
experience to deflate. Team Cherry was able to partially overcome
this problem by making one of the starting areas of the game more dynamic, changing it
as the player comes closer towards the ending. A lot of the art in the game was hand-drawn
by Ari and scanned directly into the engine. “I photographed them with my phone and cleaned
them up on the computer. From there it’s just adding pieces into
the world until it feels full. ‘Keep it simple’ was our visual goal. That mantra carried through to the rest of
the art, and was probably integral in us being able to create so large a world in two years.” Ari and William had big ideas for Hollow Knight
and without funding or any form of income for that matter, they wouldn’t be able to
execute their full vision for the game. Therefore, when no less than five sections
of the map were completed after about 6 months of development, the team felt it was time
to try and take it to the next step and launch a Kickstarter. On November 18th, 2014 the Hollow Knight Kickstarter
went live and the funding goal was set to AU$35,000. While the Kickstarter ultimately shot past
that goal with over AU$57,000 from more than 2000 backers, Team Cherry only reached their
funding goal three days before the Kickstarter was over. Near the end of the Kickstater however, donations
skyrocketed so some of the more interesting stretch goals were funded, including a Wii
U port and an additional playable character. Shortly after the launch of the Kickstarter,
Rohan Fraser decided to depart from Team Cherry to focus more on his career as an animator
and illustrator. Ari and William had now secured the future
of Hollow Knight’s development and were able to hire more people to help finish the
2D platformer. David Kazi was brought on board as the technical
director to assist with coding the game, while Chris Larkin was hired to produce the game’s
music and sound effects. Chris had already worked with Ari once before
on one of Ari’s short films called “Motorbike”. After the successful Kickstarter, the team
was also able to afford office space and moved their studio to the city of Adelaide in South
Australia. Besides funding the development, the Kickstarter
was also a clear sign for Team Cherry that Hollow Knight resonated with gamers. “It was the first signal, conceptually at
least, that we were on to something cool. We ran a beta several months after that, which
included the entire first area of the game, The Forgotten Crossroads. It was the stellar response to that area that
really cemented our direction for Hollow Knight.” Since the studio would now be porting the
game to the Wii U, they needed an engine that was a bit more flexible. With the help of experienced programmer David
Kazi, they were able to drop Stencyl and upgrade to the Unity engine. Aside from better flexibility, the engine
also allowed them to add more visual flair, which became apparent when the developers
put the results side by side. Hollow Knight was originally scheduled to
release in June 2015 and back then the team estimated that the game would only be around
two to three hours long. Thanks to the success of the Kickstarter however,
the team was able to drastically expand the scope and add more content. For example, the developers added a lot more
areas to explore in the kingdom of Hallownest. More areas also meant more different kinds
of enemies and bosses, which took a huge chunk of time to develop. Ari was mainly responsible for all the art
in the game and he has said that many of the character designs were done on the fly and
started with a single sketch. Because of time constraints, he wasn’t able
to iterate on most of his designs so whatever he drew in his sketchbooks would go straight
into the game. “Sketches like these, while seriously crude,
form the basis for most of the game. To date, I’ve filled 3 sketchbooks for Hollow
Knight. Almost everything within makes its way into
the final game. Very little is wasted. Most of these sketches are produced on Thursday
nights at a cafe meet-up of local artists. The sketches produced during that event tend
to cover about a week's worth of final work.” Once Ari had drawn a sketch, he would place
it into Photoshop to make a digital version and animate it in Photoshop as well. This whole process could take up to a week
for a boss character, but for a normal enemy Ari was able to do it much faster, sometimes
in less than two hours, including programming the enemy in Unity. To streamline this process, Team Cherry used
a plugin for Unity called PlayMaker. This plugin provides a visual programming
system through the use of flowcharts, making it much easier to understand how to implement
things like the enemy AI. William, with a basic knowledge of coding,
was now able to program a lot of the enemy behaviour himself, giving David more time
to focus on other programming tasks. In the end, a total of 149 enemy characters
were created for the base version of the game, with over 30 of them being bosses. It is worth noting that a lot of the art was
conceived in collaboration with William, who was normally very busy constructing the game’s
systems, but occasionally he would come up with his own character designs. The Cartographer is one of those designs. Ari added that Hollow Knight’s overall look
and feel is really a middle ground between him and William, including elements like lore
and dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, both Ari and William
are responsible for all the text in the game. They always had a basic plot planned out for
Hollow Knight, but much of the lore was added organically as the team added more content. The final version of the script ended up being
around 20,000 words long and was all written in a Google spreadsheet. Hollow Knight was influenced by many different
titles such as Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda II, Faxanadu and the aforementioned Mega Man
X. Furthermore, the badge system that’s present in the game was directly inspired
by Paper Mario. One of the more interesting and unique mechanics
originated from an interview where Team Cherry was asked what happens to the player when
they die. “We said something like, ‘Oh, it’ll
be a great surprise!’ and then after the interview we realized we hadn’t actually
considered that yet… We’d already completed the Knight’s death
animation, which ends with his head falling to the ground and cracking. We thought it might be interesting if you
had to travel back to the place you died, find the skull, and crack it open to regain
your money. Then we kicked around some ideas about the
skull being possessed by an enemy, or suddenly fighting back, which seemed really funny. This evolved into the idea of leaving behind
a ghost of your previous life that attacks you, which eventually became the ‘shade’
that you encounter in the final game. This is a really good example of a simple
mechanical idea we made early on that seemed inconsequential at the time, ending up having
a huge impact on the lore and the history and the nature of the character you play as. Which happened a lot.” As mentioned before, the game’s music was
performed by Chris Larkin who was given a lot of freedom and support by Team Cherry. The main instruments Chris used were the piano
and the viola and he worked on the soundtrack on and off for about two years, giving him
plenty of time to refine the musical themes in Hollow Knight. Since the narrative becomes more clear as
you progress in the world of Hallownest, Chris wanted to reflect this in the soundtrack which
is why he decided to implement leitmotifs. Leitmotifs are more commonly used in film
and opera and Chris describes it as a short melodic phrase that gets used in certain places
or themes. In Hollow Knight this translates to certain
melodies coming back later in the game to connect specific areas and themes. Although there’s no real spoken dialogue
in the game, there are a lot of voices attached to characters and most of those were done
by William, Ari and someone Team Cherry shared an office with. That someone is Makoto Koji who runs her own
animation studio called Paper Rabbits and she provided about 90% of the female voices. Some of the rest of the voiceover work was
performed by friends and families of the developers. As the team came closer to the end of Hollow
Knight’s development, they hired Matthew Griffin to market the game. Matthew reached out to streamers and content
creators to play and cover Hollow Knight in order to create as much word of mouth as possible. He also set up a deal with Fangamer to help
release Hollow Knight related merchandise. Additionally, he also scheduled many interviews
with news outlets. While Team Cherry had already created quite
a lot of word of mouth through Kickstarter and the many blog updates about Hollow Knight’s
development on Team Cherry’s website, it was still crucial to create as much buzz as
possible right before the game’s release. The small indie studio’s reputation and
possibly their future all relied on whether or not Hollow Knight would go on to become
a success. While their original Kickstarter goal was
set to AU$35,000, their estimated final budget for the game was between 90,000 and 100,000
Australian dollars, which was well over the amount of money they ultimately received from
Kickstarter and PayPal donations. Because of this the developers were forced
to take out a loan to cover some of the development costs. During the course of development, Team Cherry
had to make some drastic changes, sometimes even cutting huge chunks of content that were
already implemented in the game. A good example of this is an area that was
called “The Boneforest”. “It was a huge later-game area filled with
lava. Cutting it was tough at the time. It seemed so cool! But it was totally the right thing to do. William and I were already slammed with all
the other enormous areas to build and they all would have suffered for Boneforest’s
inclusion.” A major part of development was spent balancing
the difficulty, especially towards the end when more testers were brought in to play
the game. To get more accurate feedback they used free
applications like Trello to provide a way to highlight bugs and other problems. Some testers described the game’s difficulty
as “pitch perfect” while others said it was “punishingly difficult”. From the beginning of development Team Cherry
leaned more on making the game easier through various ways such as guiding players clearly,
offering help through characters in the world, and the general flow of the game. Another smaller example is the slash size
of the Knight. “The slash has been growing through all
of development, and it just keeps going. It’s grown to the point where you can sometimes
wack enemies through walls and ceilings, and that’s great! We’re huge fans of small game-breaks that
allow players to cheat their way towards victory.” The promised Wii U version was eventually
dropped in favor for a Nintendo Switch version. By early 2017 it was clear that the Wii U
was at the end of its life cycle so it made much more sense to port the game to Nintendo’s
newest console. Yet, it was still a difficult decision that
Team Cherry had to make, since they promised Kickstarter backers a Wii U port. Luckily, by the time the Switch version was
released, many backers had already moved over to the newer hybrid console. After almost three years of development, Hollow
Knight was released on PC on the 24th of February, 2017, followed by the Mac and Linux versions
later that year on the 11th of April. The game received universal praise from critics
and gamers with many reviewers calling Hollow Knight a masterpiece. Everything from the combat to the lore seemed
to click with gamers around the world and it didn’t take long for the game to sell
half a million copies. After its release, there was still a lot of
work left to be done. For starters, Team Cherry was still hard at
work to finish the Nintendo Switch port. Fortunately, they were able to hire another
Australian studio called Jump Shark Studios who helped to re-work the game’s code for
the Switch. The original plan was to release Hollow Knight
on the Switch shortly after its release, but the team had to delay the game to June 12th,
2018. That day Nintendo’s E3 Direct presentation
took place and during the presentation it was announced that Hollow Knight would be
available to purchase later that day. The Switch version was surprisingly popular,
with 250,000 copies selling two weeks after its release. Besides the Switch port, the studio was also
figuring out how to implement a second playable character that was funded during the Kickstarter. During the story you meet a character called
Hornet and Team Cherry intended to make her a playable character in an upcoming DLC pack
for Hollow Knight. However, in February 2019 it was announced
that Hollow Knight would get a fully fledged sequel called Silksong and that Hornet would
be the main character. Between the game’s release and the announcement
of a sequel, Team Cherry worked on many updates to optimize the game and even released four
free DLC packs. Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood
and the final DLC pack Godmaster all provided fresh new content, such as new boss encounters,
new quests, new music tracks, new enemies, new charms and so on. This kept the experience fresh for veteran
players and gave new players all the more reason to pick up and play Hollow Knight. In 2018, the game was eventually ported to
Xbox and PlayStation as well, with official physical editions of the game coming out in
2019. In February 2019, Team Cherry revealed that
Hollow Knight had sold over 2.8 million copies. Thanks to this overwhelming success and with
Silksong on the horizon, Team Cherry is able to keep living their dream and make video
games for a living. “Our goal was always to get ourselves into
a position where we could just keep making stuff, and we’re grateful we’ve gotten
there thanks to everyone’s support. Defining success back then was easy. It was just, ‘Selling enough to be able
to make another game.’ Had we achieved only that, we would have been
happy.”
