The Making Of: Knight Tyme
David Jones revisits the third game in his Magic Knight series
Besides being arguably the best Magic Knight adventure, Knight Tyme was also the most ambitious Spectrum 128K launch title. David Jones tells Retro Gamer how he created his epic sci-fi classic
The Spectrum 128K didn’t become available in Britain until early 1986, but the new computer was made available to some UK publishers a few months earlier. Most commissioned enhanced versions of existing titles for the unproven system, but budget specialist Mastertronic asked David Jones to design a game that would showcase the new machine’s capabilities, as the former developer remembers. “I’d already started on Knight Tyme as a 48K game,” David says of his Spectrum 128K launch title, “then someone at Mastertronic said, ‘Here’s the new version of the Spectrum. Do you want to write your next game on it?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ I was still earning quite good royalties from Finders Keepers and Spellbound, and to me this was something that would be fun.”
Given the Spectrum 128K’s advantages,
David could have put Knight Tyme on the back burner and designed a fresh concept for Sinclair’s new system, but he opted to continue the Magic Knight’s menu-driven adventures on the more capable computer. “There was no point in inventing a brand-new character for a machine that didn’t have any sales yet,” David reasons, “and from the reviews I was getting, I was very confident that Knight Tyme would sell. Largely, I was writing the sort of game I wanted to play. I always liked adventure games, but having to work out which words to use seemed somewhat primitive. Having a menu system that showed you options allowed you to give commands as if you had typed them in, but without having to guess the words.”
But rather than making Knight Tyme a pure arcade-style adventure, David added a few platforms to his spaceship-set sequel, although unlike its predecessor, Spellbound,
he connected his follow-up’s platforming to its overall objective. “I still put a few bits of platforming in Knight Tyme, where you had to jump on objects to jump onto other things, but not in a pointless platform-y kind of way,” David explains. “I didn’t think I’d done platforming to death, but I also didn’t see any great challenge in putting a bunch of random platforms in a spaceship.”
More appropriate by far were the robotic characters that David equipped his sci-fi adventure’s spaceship with, which he decided should be more helpful than their human counterparts. “I was thinking in terms of the robots appearing in some ways alive,” David ponders, “but they were actually machines made by people and put on the spaceship for a particular reason, so they would be more likely to obey your commands, because that’s what they were built for.”
One trait that Knight Tyme’s characters would share, however, was that they didn’t need to be looked after by the player, which David felt was fair given the grand scale of his follow-up. “I thought looking after the characters in Spellbound was one of the hardest bits,” David considers, “and there was enough challenge from working out things in Knight Tyme, because not only did you have to map the rooms, but you had to map the stars and how
“NOT ONLY DID YOU HAVE TO MAP THE ROOMS, BUT YOU HAD TO MAP THE STARS AND HOW THEY CONNECTED FROM ONE TO ANOTHER”
DAVID JONES
they connected from one to another. And then in some of those locations that you could beam down to, you had to map some bits of those as well. So there were plenty of things for people to do.”
But despite its emphasis of exploration,
David wanted Knight Tyme to incorporate task maintenance, although he restricted this aspect of his game to its spaceship. “It was partly coming down to not looking after the individual characters,” David says, “in that you got one spaceship to look after rather than lots of other people. So it was a replacement maintenance task; you just weren’t maintaining people.”
Since the motivation for keeping Knight Tyme’s futuristic mode of transport operational was to be able to travel between distant planets, David hid objects on some of those worlds that were essential to making progress. “I wanted to have a bit more of a reason to go from planet to planet,” David notes. “If all you had done was go to a starbase and refuel your spaceship then why bother going to the planets? But the way I linked the maps together, there were some places where you had to take a few hops, and if you went too fast you would use too much fuel.”
In order to avoid confusion, running out of fuel in Knight Tyme would result in sudden death rather than being stranded, but David also positioned space pirates at the heart of his game’s starmap to deter overly slow pilots.
“If the spaceship got into a position where it couldn’t get fuel, and it couldn’t move, then at least with instant death you knew [it was game over],” David observes, “you didn’t waste five minutes thinking that something was going to happen. Then there was an area on the starmap where you could only get to the other half of the planets from a pinch point, and you had to get through there fairly quickly to get to the other half of the map.”
But while space pirates and starmaps were a natural fit for David’s futuristic adventure, his game’s medieval hero and his magic spells seemed slightly at odds with Knight Tyme. “Well the character was called Magic Knight, so you would expect him to be able to do some magic,” David grins, “and Arthur C Clarke had been quoted as saying: ‘Any technology that’s suitably advanced looks like magic.’ So Magic Knight might have just been using technology. Maybe someone came back from the future to ancient times and built ‘magic’ into his suit of armour.”
Whatever the reasoning for it, magic would be essential to solving some of the challenges that David devised for Knight Tyme, whereas the game’s other puzzles would require players to find items to overcome sticking points. “I liked the idea of paired objects and obstacles,” David reflects. “You’d work out what you had seen and what you had picked up, but if you saw a problem and hadn’t seen the ‘solution object’ then at some point later on you would come across it and think, ‘Oh, hang about! That would work with that earlier problem.’”
But rather than allowing the objects in Knight Tyme to be collected en masse, David limited the number that could be carried at any one time, which had the effect of rewarding careful planning. “Juggling objects was directly ripped out of ‘two word’ adventure games,” David admits. “You only had a limited inventory, and so you had to temporarily get rid of an object that was going to be useful later, but then you would go back and pick up that object once you had solved a problem.”
“YOU DIDN’T NEED TO LOOK AFTER ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, SO I WANTED TO MAKE SOME OF THE PUZZLES A BIT MORE COMPLEX”
DAVID JONES
As well as backtracking to find cast-aside items, Knight Tyme’s challenge also incorporated multi-part puzzles based on assembling magic artefacts, which David added to raise his latest adventure’s difficulty to the same level as his previous one. “I knew I was making Knight Tyme a little bit easier, because you didn’t need to look after all of the characters,” David concedes, “so I wanted to make some of the puzzles a bit more complex. I wanted to make sure there were definite challenges in there.”
One definite challenge that David came up with was disguised as a helpful hint, but in actual fact it was a trap for unwary players. “I remember a particularly mean problem with the teleporter in Knight Tyme!” David laughs. “You had to put in X, Y and Z coordinates to go where you wanted to go, and with one of them I’d given the clue of what the coordinates were as Z, Y, X. So people just wrote the numbers down, and then when it came to put them in they got it wrong and ended up burst apart in space or something!”
But while David’s wicked sense of humour was noted by excited reviewers on Knight Tyme’s release, the aspect of his adventure that they raved about was that it showed off what the Spectrum 128K was capable of, unlike the system’s other launch titles. “Well obviously I was pretty pleased,” David enthuses. “I’d had fun doing it, and I’d been able to make a bigger game than I could have otherwise. I was actually quite surprised that most of the other companies had just added a bit of music and some extra rooms, but I hadn’t really given that a lot of consideration. I thought I was up against a whole bunch of people coming out with brand-new games, but other companies waited to see if the Spectrum 128K caught on before they bothered writing for it.”
The original Spectrum was the more popular machine, however, and so David stripped back Knight Tyme to make it fit the system’s smaller memory, with little or no thought given to splitting his sprawling adventure into two loads. “I never liked multiload,” he says. “It seemed like a horrible idea, and if you had used it for a game where you could go into any part of it at any time then people would have just gotten totally pissed off. So what I did was compress all of the text and did some compression of some of the graphics. I reduced the number of planets you could go to, then because I’d knocked out some planets, I knocked out some of the bits you could beam down to, but I kept the essential elements of the game in there.”
Assessing his spacefaring adventure game decades later, David offers improvements he would make with hindsight, but he considers Knight Tyme to be his best Magic Knight adventure, and the one that he’s most fond of. “I would try to do twice as big a map than I had for the stars, and I would have the characters walking around,” the developer muses, “but Knight Tyme is still my favourite of the Magic Knight trilogy that came out after Finders Keepers. Technically it’s the best one, because it was when I got the data compression going. I had reached that sweet spot where I knew people wanted it because of the reaction to Spellbound, and I was giving them something bigger and better.”