The Making Of...
How a world revealed itself to its patient creators, and became the setting for a modern classic
How Hollow Knight’s world revealed itself, and became the setting for a modern classic
BY JEN SIMPKINS Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer/publisher Team Cherry Origin Australia Release 2017
Hollow Knight – a game about a subterranean insect world, where nails appear large enough to be swords and caterpillars are the size of freight trains – was never meant to be big. In 2019, Team Cherry’s debut is a success of behemothic proportions. Sales of the game on Steam surpassed one million back in June last year, the day before it was due to release on Switch. When it did, after a surprise announcement during Nintendo’s E3 Direct, it sold 250,000 copies in its first two weeks. It was meant to be a two-hour jaunt: now, Hallownest’s dizzying maze of tunnels webs out ceaselessly into the dark, players poking into the corners of its sprawling geography for days on end. ‘Scope creep’ doesn’t quite cover it: this is the story of a world that took on a life of its own.
The people at the centre of it, Ari Gibson and William Pellen, met through mutual friends: Gibson worked in animation, Pellen in web development. In 2014, the two entered a game jam, and Hungry Knight was born – made in 72 hours, you moved the titular character around a field, eating fruit every ten seconds to refill a draining hunger meter. Pellen was inspired to create a fruit-eating bug character by a recent playthrough of Pikmin. “And it’s easy to represent a bug with very few lines,” says Gibson, the game’s main artist. “When you’re thinking about jams, you’re thinking about things that are small, that you can create with relative ease. Bugs can be depicted quickly and at a small scale, and have those graphic qualities – those distinct horns and distinct body shapes.”
Another, later game jam seemed tailor-made for another exploration of the idea. The theme was ‘Beneath The Surface’ – they missed the deadline, but “it got us thinking about what we could make if we wanted to make a really small, quick game.” Pellen says. “If you think about an ant nest, it fits really well into the idea of a Metroidvania map. When we came up with the concept, a ruined underground kingdom full of insects, then it was easy to start thinking: ‘What does their little world look like? What would a snail be doing here, or a grasshopper?’ But the idea was way smaller when we started.”
Hollow Knight started off in Stencil, with Pellen teaching himself to program via its accessible visual coding system. “I’d made a platforming character in that, and we used it for the Hollow Knight character,’ he says. “I said, ‘Let’s just work on this until we’ve got two hours of running around in a world.’” Hallownest started from its central hub area, the town of Dirtmouth, and you’d descend into a tutorial-type zone, the Crossroads. Three more areas would surround it: a fungus area, a city and a (later cut) bone area, each with its own boss to defeat. “That was the world for a while, and that eventually grew and grew, and each bit split into different parts,” Pellen says. “Ari started working on the basic bits of art, pieces of the world, and I started making the character straight away – its dash, its jump, its attack.”
In the basic caves, enemies were introduced to test player movement and combat. “It looked a lot like what the final version really looks like”, Gibson says, “with a character that behaves and looks almost identical to the final version. So then it became a case of filling in a world around it.” Pellen adds: “You can kind of see, if you look at the map, that it kind of starts with Dirtmouth and Crossroads, and then things spread out from that. And that basic structure of fighting those three bosses and then returning back to the Crossroads, it’s still there.” Gibson laughs: “Everything else is scope creep.” The bigger it got, the more the two realised that they wanted to do the idea justice and work on it full- time. At the end of 2014, they took the project to Kickstarter, hoping for $25,000 – they raised around $43,000, and brought in a third team member, technical director David Kazi, who knew Unity and could move development into the engine to facilitate the larger scale and console ports. Hollow Knight had room to grow.
The austere Forgotten Crossroads, as it’s now known, set the aesthetic touchstone. “For a time, the game looked like that in its entirety, when it was at a very small scale,” Gibson says. “The variants like Greenpath were something that developed as we just explored that network of caves and found out what new areas looked like.” But even as the rest of the world began to flourish, it was important to Team Cherry the carefully pitched tone of the starting area was preserved. “The idea is that it’s sort of like a microcosm of the game, which means it’s got a few loops that don’t have an endpoint straight away, places where you find you can’t go any further until you come back with a power-up.”
The pace, too, is strictly set, with new abilities being handed out later than in most Metroidvanias; the “dreary melancholy” of the place, Gibson felt, suited an approach where they would take a step back, allowing the player space to orient themselves in the caves. “The list of core powerups was there from the start of development, which was when we had a much shorter game,” Pellen says. “As it expanded, gaps appeared between all these power-ups – but rather than trying to think of new power-ups, it seemed to fit the tone to space these key moments out.” Keeping the character’s moveset simple, Gibson says, helped “break that feel of a directorial rhythm. Like, we’re not controlling your adventure through the world, and the world will wait for you to take it at your own pace.”
Instead, the spaces were filled with lorerevealing curiosities, hidden Grubs to rescue and deliver home, the optional Charms that allow you to completely reshape the Knight’s loadout of abilities. Most importantly came all manner of memorable characters, voiced by Gibson, Pellen, friends and family: the ever-imperiled Zote The Mighty; the Last Stag, who regales you with tales from Hallownest’s past as you ride it from station to station; Cornifer, whose humming you follow to find a map to fill in while exploring each area. “We were constantly playing it, so we were always in it,” Pellen says, “which
“WE’RE NOT CONTROLLING YOUR ADVENTURE… THE WORLD WILL WAIT FOR YOU TO TAKE IT AT YOUR OWN PACE”
means we’d quickly get a feel for when there’s a lull, when something feels a bit flat, or abrupt.”
The two would play through an area, and discuss – the need for an extra NPC encounter, perhaps, and who it would make sense to meet there. “You just listen to the world, and what would be believable within it,” Gibson says. “And that also means you can go through a phase where perhaps you’re meeting several NPCs very rapidly in a row, or engaging two or three big bosses that aren’t spaced out in perfect chunks. But because it has the relevant context, it actually starts to make the world feel more believable.” By that metric, characters like the Hunter – a bloodthirsty NPC who gives you a journal to document all the enemy types you kill – began to appear in lieu of a simple menu option.
Hollow Knight’s world was becoming more place than videogame, and getting larger every day.
Team Cherry’s game-jam beginnings influenced the way it worked as a studio: starting small, from the tried-and-true structures of series such as Zelda and Castlevania combined with all the details – the traps, the tricks, the trust in the player – the devs felt they would want from a game. “When you see all these little things coming to life in front of your eyes at a rapid rate, possibly within hours, that’s hugely motivating,” Gibson says. “That’s the secret that allowed us to just keep going with all our expanding and building, and making this world ever larger and ever more full of strange characters – the loop is just so quick.”
Indeed, the unlit, skittering abyss of Deepnest – one of Hollow Knight’s most infamous areas – was built from cocooning layers of nastiness. There was a big, empty space in the bottom-left of the map: they had the arachnid theme they wanted to explore, and a lantern item but only a few places to use it. Thus, the area began to spin itself into shape. “We had a tone we wanted to hit,” Pellen says, “so it’s drawing on the things that trigger that stuff – tight spaces, having your moveset limited, and previously established rules being broken or shifted around.” Gibson adds: “80 per cent of Hollow Knight is ideas that bounce from one of us to the other, and then bounce back, and then bounce off to a new place, and then suddenly spiral out to some huge elaborate thing like a Deepnest.” Or, indeed, putting a save bench where hapless adventurers would most likely land with low health after falling through a floor. “The impactful part is having to dig your way back to a safe area – or even further in,” Gibson says. “If you overcome that – and possibly some people don’t and they leave in despair – that’s a great reward for tenacity.”
You might assume Team Cherry hasn’t suffered anything of the sort in the development of Hollow Knight, which was instantly beloved by Kickstarter backers, praised by beta testers, and immediately garnered glowing reviews post-release. Towards the end of 2015, however, things were getting dicey. “We ran out of money,” Gibson says. “William was buying ham ends from the market.” “Assorted meat ends,” Pellen clarifies, before Gibson continues: “Assorted meat ends. We just used what we had to develop the game, and then right at the very end, maybe a month before…” He laughs, and Pellen finishes the thought: “The guy across the hallway was bringing us leftover sandwiches from his meetings. They were good!”
“Even at that point we were having quite a good time,” Gibson says. “You find there are plenty of ways to live cheaply when you need to, and have people who are willing to help you out. We weren’t doing crazy things like remortgaging our houses, or going into debt. So even if the game wasn’t a success, we weren’t going to end up on the street.” Pellen recalls: “The whole thing was quietly difficult, really. There weren’t any big mishaps, but at the same time, we didn’t really breeze through – we put a lot of hours into it.” With a budget of $100,000, however, even a moderate success would mean Team Cherry could make another game, which was the ultimate end goal. ‘Success’ barely covers it. Hollow Knight quickly covered its costs and more besides, meaning Team Cherry could start on free content packs, including additions such as pins for maps as well as boss fights and a new fast-travel mechanic. “Even when we were doing those things, I was wary,” Pellen says. “If you spend too much time filing it down, you start to make the player aware of the artifice.” Gibson explains further: “It’s a big, dangerous kingdom – it’s not meant to be an even, polished thing. It’s good for us, because it means we don’t have sleepless nights afterwards, wishing what could have been. We get to think, ‘That’s Hallownest as it exists’, and then eventually move on to other worlds.”
There’s no guarantee that their future creations will be as fortunate. “There have been a lot of lucky moments with our timelines that have worked well for us,” Pellen says. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a better console for their tiny, absorbing, allconsuming game than Switch (“Yeah, it’s 1:1 scale on the handheld,” Gibson grins), whose success prompted the abandonment of the Wii U port in favour of it, and was yet another shot in the arm for Team Cherry. But in Hollow Knight, Gibson and Pellen proved themselves students of the classics, and modern masters of worldbuilding. Reflected in their debut game is an understanding of the merits of patience and poise in the face of a grand challenge. And, moreover, what it takes to tempt an adventurer beneath the surface – to speak to “the compulsion,” as Pellen puts it, “to dig into the darkness, to illuminate it and start to map it out.”