How Hollow Knight's Design Tells Its Story Without Words

hey there girls boys and all you wonderful people who lie somewhere between this video is a short preview of a massive Hollow Knight lore essay I'm working on which is going to lay out a ton of new discoveries in the form of a complete hollowness timeline The Darkest Timeline I'm making this video because the section on environmental storytelling ended up becoming so involved that I thought it could stand on its own as well as hopefully drum up something of an audience by the time the full video was released before I start I should give a quick spoiler warning though this is a short video it will be spoiling a couple of mid-game areas in some of the lore of hollow Knight if you've already played the game or are otherwise cool with that come along with me as I take a look at the phenomenal environmental storytelling of hollow Knight hey Rick in case any of you all are unfamiliar with the term environmental storytelling is the art of conveying story to players strictly through the design of a game environment the earliest example I can think of is found in Metroid 2. in that game you play as Intergalactic Bounty Hunter Samus Aaron who accepts a government contract to exterminate the creatures known as metroids the metroids are unstoppable Predators who travel from planet to planet killing wait wait that's not right what [Music] according to the manual the scientists who hired Samus actually took metroids off their Homeworld where they were then stolen by space pirates who replicated the Metroid with beta rays and blah blah blah ret except Sam has spent the last game eliminating the space pirates and their pet Metro petroids and a sizable portion of planet zevis So based on what we know the metroids who again Samus was hired to exterminate don't really pose a threat to anyone not on their Homeworld uh uh back to gameplay samus's descent into the Metroid Homeworld is marked by encounters with increasingly mature and dangerous life stages of the Metroid you begin on the planet's surface teeming with young metroids and other wildlife 39 dead metroids later your journey ends at a long trip to the lair of the Metroid Queen deep within the planet and it's a solitary trip devoid of all the non-metroid wildlife you encountered at the surface because the metroids down here have killed them all foreign at this point in the hands of weaker designers Samus would get a call from our ship's computer and she would stop and the player would sigh and then a text box would pop up that said Samus according to my scanners it looks like the metroids in this Zone have hunted their prey into Extinction instead the observant player learns the same information in a far more impactful way from the design of the game environment this experience of active narrative Discovery versus passive narrative delivery makes the former simply hit different that's the power of environmental storytelling this is a difficult trick to pull off but if you manage it you can cater your game to a fuller spectrum of players providing fewer pauses in the action for those who don't care about lore while simultaneously rewarding thoughtful observation from players who enjoy learning everything there is to know about a game's world so how does this apply to hollow Knight where from soft famously rely on cryptic item descriptions and the better half of lore tube to fill in the massive blanks between cut scenes and dialogues team Cherry have done the same with the visual design of every nook and cranny and hollownest the result of their efforts is a game world that feels alive feels fully realized in a way I've never seen before it's too real and tells an engrossing story to those willing to dig in and put the pieces together themselves or watch a video made by an aspiring YouTuber and Hollow Knight obsessive so how did team Cherry accomplish this the first technique used was adding depth literally like many 2D game designers before them team Cherry utilized stacked 2D layers to give a real sense of depth to their environments honestly they use so many layers of Sprites that the sheer amount of detail can make it hard to see just how much there is there if you've played the game you probably already have a good idea of what I mean don't worry though I think I have just the thing to make visualizing this a bit simpler here's a clip of me in the visually simple starting area of King's pass po going on some spikes on my way to collect Fury of the Fallen no big deal I'm basically a speedrunner let's run that back one more time and ah check out all those layers okay okay that was a bit fast let's try something a bit different as you can see even this simplified Recreation I made is quite complicated when you break it down starting from the back there's a black plain and lightly blurred shells and eggs then the first two layers of spikes then six fog elements layered for depth then the player light then the first of the foreground spikes the first layer of roof elements followed by the floor which itself is made of three layers then a layer of masking Silhouettes the player and nail effects one last layer of spikes and finally the foreground masking elements temples before we move on I feel it necessary to mention that while this Recreation of a single screenshot took me around five hours to build she's obsessed with it it's actually missing more layers and effects than I'd care to count remember too that I chose this scene in this place for its relative simplicity game devs take note this is world class visual design it's a flipping game design doctor and it's here to put on a clinic but team Terry didn't stop there they also crafted each environment to reflect its part in the long history of the game World the clearest example of this can be found in the Queen's Gardens but first here's a quick refresher on the history of the gardens which can be broken up into three eras before the kingdom of hollowness even existed these Caverns were the other half of Green Path home of un and her green children the moskin the first era ended when the new king of hollownest showed up and suddenly his new Queen was like all this belongs to me now with no real ability to resist the moskin could only block off access to the caverns and consider them lost the queen turned them into ornamental Gardens that basically functioned as a well-guarded vacation home the final era began much later sometime after the fall of hollownest when an exiled tribe of mantises set up encampments in the area and forced the queen to hunker down in a far corner of her Gardens so now we've got a checklist if the visual design of Queen's Gardens is going to convey that same story it's got to show us elements from each of the three major eras in the Region's history let's see how they accomplished this first the enemies we encounter here are Moss flies as their name and visual design suggests they are likely lost members of the Green Path moskin specifically resembling an evolution of the Moss creep they and the similar undergrowth seen here with pale glowies instead of the green glowies of un are Testaments to the Region's pre-hollownest history so we can check that off the list the next stage of this area's history belongs to the queen AKA The Root aka the white lady AKA Winnie the AKA AK AKA Brown lightning and we can see her signature plants and Roots all over the shop partially buried under all that plant life is the ruined architecture which helps to convey that this area was at one time an ornamental Garden which has long since been reclaimed by flora-run rampant era 2 check and finally at the bottom of the room we see evidence of the most recent changes to the area telltale signs of the traitor mantis occupation check One Last Detail of note is what I like to call God particles God particles can be found in every area and indicate through their color duration size and motion which higher power rules an area and just how strong that power is here the god particles are white short-lived rather dim and flow gently upwards this tells us that the white lady is still the reigning higher power here but that her sway over the area is weak so there you have it the entire history of this area is explicitly laid out in its visual design if you think this level of environmental consistency and wordless storytelling is impressive believe me when I say this room's conveyed history is pretty simple compared to many many others in the game which conveniently I'll be covering in detail in the full video [Music] so to recap Hollow Knight's environmental storytelling is you know I mean it is pretty good I hope I was able to show even the hollow Knight lore veterans among you something new or at least give you a deeper appreciation for the masterful work that went into crafting this game I hope too that this brief preview has you excited to check out the full video which is going to cover the entire timeline of hollow Knight and bring to light a bunch of new lore including why it is that the acid has spread from isma's Grove across the entirety of hollownest the location of the Queen's original home before the king arrived and the real reason for the hollow Knights impurity just to name a few in lieu of the standard thanking of the patreon supporters which is sort of impossible when you don't have a patreon I'll end the video with some real talk in case any of you are also struggling to finish a large project I've been working on the full Hollow Knight timeline essay for about three months now and sustaining that kind of effort requires both dedication and a lot of confidence when you're writing your first script recording yourself for the first time and learning how to edit video from scratch there are times when it's really hard to ignore that inner critic who tells you that you're wasting your time that no one will want to watch your video and that may be the reason you can't find anyone talking about what you've uncovered is that you're entirely full of oh who wants to be a person who is wrong then before you know it you can't stop hearing adult diagnosed ADHD in decades of baggage proudly presents the ultimate self-sabotage collection 38 familiar favorites from recent chart toppers like what makes you think you deserve success or not a real queer to those nostalgic gems you've loved your whole life so much potential Why Try Again unfinished project medley if you give up now we'll throw in internalized homophobia's greatest hits at no extra charge when that crap starts again well now I can point to this video and change the channel is that a good motivation I don't really know but it got me here and even if I never make another video at least I'll have that so thank you genuinely for watching this video and helping me silence that voice and if anyone watching this video right now is under attack from that same inner critic I want you to know that you can finish that project as hard as it is and I know it's hard all you have to do is refuse to give up refuse to stop trying and you will finish it that's how I finished this until next video stay safe stay weird and maybe go play some Hollow Knight

Channel: errric

Views: 8,883

Keywords: design, hollow knight, lore, environmental storytelling

Id: 5gdZI2R5MRU

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2023