everygame:

Knight & Damsel (PC, OUYA)
Developed/Published by: MK-ULTRA Games
Released: August 20th, 2015
Completed: 20th August, 2015
Completion: I’ve played it more than you will ever know.
Trophies / Achievements: Doesn’t have them (at the minute) but does have trading cards on Steam I guess! Which I haven’t earned…

A different meaning for “finished” this week, because I feel like I have to use this blog to note that the game I’ve shepherded for the past two years came out last Thursday, simultaneously released on PC and OUYA. I’ll cut to the chase: if you’ve enjoyed Every Game I’ve Finished, like, at all, and you’d like to help support it, you can buy Knight & Damsel and not merely support me in a vaguely indirect way, but get a game out of it at the same time! It’s available on Steam, Humble Store, Itch.io and OUYA, and for roughly the next week and a half it’s 20% off, so just $7.99 / £5.59 / €7.99.

Pitch over!

However, I feel I should write a few about Knight & Damsel here. I can’t exactly critique it, of course, that’s for others to do but I’ll write a little. If you’re totally unfamiliar with it, Knight & Damsel is a two-player “uncooperative” game in which the Knight and Damsel are attempting to rescue the other, while also attempting to impede the other’s progress by throwing items onto their screen, so that when they finally meet, one player has gotten further into the level. It’s somewhat the tug-of-war of something like Nidhogg combined with the indirect combat of something like Puzzle Fighter.

As this was my first attempt to run a company, and fully creatively control a game project, there were challenges. On top of that, we’d chosen to take a jam idea (something prototyped in about a weekend at TOJam 2013) and take that into full production, and that has incredible difficulties related (you just have to consider something like Super Time Force, which I remember being perfect at TOJam, but which needed a lot of work to be turned into a full product.) Then on top of that, the basic idea was controversial—I won’t shy away from the fact that I wanted to see if mechanics could hold the equivalent message to the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series—which meant that we had to negotiate not only people’s expectations, but our own messaging, and consider how certain mechanics, meant one way, might translate another.

But I’m proud of it! I completed a thing, and more than that, I did it with a talented team that was truly diverse, something I felt MK-ULTRA Games should be committed to. I couldn’t have done it without Andrew Carvalho (the true backbone of the project), Izzie Colpitts-Campbell, Robby Duguay, Noreen Rana, Yuliya Boublikova or Maggie McLean, and when I think of this release, it’s their glory, not mine.

Will I ever play it again? I’ll play again as I do hope to show it to more people at events and so on, and of course, for the testing of patches. But one day I’ll put it down and never play it again, and that’s ok.

Final Thought: In future I really do hope to be able to discuss the nitty-gritty of the game’s design process, which doesn’t seem like it fits here (it would be thousands of words, and diagrams, long) I might try pitching GDC talk about it (though I better be serious about that, as submissions are due in like, three days…)

Oh hey, we forgot to reblog Mathew’s words on the release of Knight & Damsel! Might as well do that now.