I had the pleasure of working once again with Jonathan Levstein, and another 9story artist friend of ours, Pablo Nilo. Much like our previous game AdventureWare, this game was put together in Construct2, exporting for the web in HTML5. Here’s the story behind our Knife Fight Game.
Obviously we didn’t follow the jam theme of “Heartbeats” – but that’s didn’t really matter to us. We felt it was more important to come together and make the cool project that WE wanted to make, regardless.
The idea started with Jonathan talking about a Juggernaut style match, he shared that idea with us in a coffee shop a couple nights before the jam. We got to talking about how being the Juggernaut is “like bringing a gun to a knife fight” – and it stuck. Pablo said it would be great to make them like 40’s gangsters, and he came up with these great, top-heavy Dick Tracy-looking guys.
I ran with that old-timey 40’s theme, and recorded all of the instruments analog, even tracking drums with a friend of mine who is a jazz drummer (Paul Hyesung Cho, who has no website to link to unfortunately). I even used the Izotope Vinyl plugin to make the main track output sound as old-timey and crackley as I could manage. My apologies to the people in room C at George Brown during the jam who had to put up with my loud trumpet playing…
So on the downside, doing a multiplayer game, whether in-browser or for desktop – it’s really difficult to manage multiple inputs. Most keyboards don’t register more than 3 or 4 key inputs at the same time. It’s also really hard to crowd 4 people around one keyboard anyway. We decided to go with xbox controllers – but even then you can’t map those keys easily without 3rd party software. WE GOT IT GOIN THOUGH
After seeing the project in a playable state and considering the inconvenience of keymapping, I’ve been thinking we should consider porting Knife Fight to XNA and release on XBLIG, because I feel it would work well there, especially since you are forced to used controllers. If you have any interest in this or comments on the game or porting process, please contact me via email or on twitter.
You can play the game here, and remember you’ll need to use joy2key or Mac GamePad Companion.