Me And Sir Knight

Jam: Siberian Game Jam on April 27, 2019 / Ludum Dare 44

Theme: „Your life is a currency”.

Game page on the itch.io ← download or play in the browser

Your hero is a squire of a noble Knight sir Cedric. Together you are going to fight the evil for the great justice (and certainly for some treasures). Sir Knight is very strong, but not very clever, so you'll need to somehow direct his actions by giving him right weapon and other items. Also you'll need to sharpen his weapon, because it becames dull quickly in the sir Kningt's mighty hands.

You will meet four different enemies, all with special attacks and abilities, certain amount of humour and a surprising final.

The Development Process

After our failure with the previous game jam we wanted to make all things right on the next one. We have a quite large team. The optimal number of people is usually concidered from 3 to 4, because larger teams experiences communication problems. We did not want to kick anyone out of the team, and… we decided to invite one more member. Dina joined us as a project manager to coordinate the team work, and as a technical designer to do some routine stuff (like the textures export, etc). Also, Antony Firsov, our game designer, left the Novosibirsk, and we wanted somebody with a new ideas.

We started to prepare for the next jam about two months before it. First of all, we got a super-useful book „The Game Jam Survival Guide” by Christer Kaitila.

It's a really great book. We totally recommend it to all beginner jammers. For example, from this book we got that we broke all the principles of a good game development process. Seriously, it's not very large, and there is tons of useful information.

The second thing: we started to hold a brainstorming meetings. We wanted to decide what game we will create, and we wanted to decide it before the jam. Anhel digged into the game engines, Nika and Ivy learned different art technics, and Di downloaded a lot of sound plugins into his PC and was experimenting with it.

At one of these meetings Dina told us the idea: „What if player will control a minor character? Like a squire or a servant?” The more we discussed this concept, the more we realized that it's so great that we will not invent a better one.

Couple of days before the jam Arthur joined our team as a programmer, he learned Godot Engine in a single night as a real hero. When we got the theme we spent an hour fitting our concept into it. We can't call it the perfect fit, but... Whatever, this will do.

The Jam itself went exactly as planned. Dina coordinated all the workflow, Meven was creating character animations at the light speed, Nika and Ivy were drawing backgrounds and other stuff, Di was trying to make some soundtracks. At the last day of the jam Ivy felt herself bad, so Nika selflessly made a cut-scenes and all the missing graphics.

We've tired a lot, but we've finished exactly at time, and voila

Summary

The main thing is when you prepare yourself beforehand, everything goes fine. Everybody knows what to do and how to do it. Godot game engine is perfect for the 2D projects. Of course not everything was smooth. There was some really bad issues with the game that we fixed in several days after the jam, but nevertheless people liked it.

The game have some problems with the controls. It's simple, but very non-obvious. It makes the game hard for the beginners. We should add some tutorial or helpful tips, but we had no time for it.

We liked this jam much more than the previous one. Our game is addictive and interesting, although short and poorly replayable. Surely we could develop it into good mobile timeeater, but... Whatever, this will do.

Bonus: How To Visit GameDev Weekend For Free

We brought „Me and Sir Knight” to the Novosibirsk largest 2-day open-air gamedev conference GameDev Weekend that took place at August 2019 on the beach of the Ob Sea. We applied our game to the Indie Showcase, and all applicants got a free ticket 😁️. It's really wonderful feeling to see other people playing your game.

We've got tons of feedback from the players. This event worth it despite the free tickets.

Also we've got into a Ducat's video (Ducat is a Russian youtuber making content about indie game development). In that video Anhel tells about the development of „Me and Sir Knight” and about game development industry in the whole. And there is a showcase of Novosibirsk indie games.

Also, Ducat made a post on his VK page with a poll for the best game of the showcase, and guess who won? 😉️

The Team

Dina „at-that-moment-still-Malinovskaya” Griko

game design, project management, narrative, technical design

Dmitry Meven

characters design, character animations, effects

Nika Bauer

graphics, backgrounds, UI, cut scenes

Evelina „Ivy” Mayer

graphics, backgrounds, UI elements

Anatoly „Anhel” Griko

programming

Arthur Mikhalyov

programming

Dmitry „Di” Aldagarov

music

Technical Details

• Engine: Godot Engine 3.1 with GDScript
• Supported platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, WebAssembly
• Code repositiry: GitHub
• Game page: itch.io — download and/or play