Oh, did I win?

*transforms into this*

Indie Game Spotlight: KNIGHTS AND BIKES

Knights and Bikes is a solo or co-op action-adventure in which you play as childhood friends hunting for treasure on an ancient island. It’s a story-based experience with lots of action and emotional moments. You explore on your bikes (which you can upgrade and customize), solve puzzles, deal with enemies, and explore levels. All this in cooperation with your in-game friend (and your pet goose!).

We chatted with Rex Crowle, who made the game with his friend, Moo Yu. With only two of them at Foam Sword, they kept very busy with lots of different roles. Rex was responsible for the art, animation, level design, and storytelling—“So those bits are my fault! :)”.

How does the art style in Knights and Bikes capture the essence of childhood and imagination?

The idea behind the art is that you’re seeing the world through the eyes of the kids who are having this adventure. It’s an island steeped in legend and mystery that would be fun to explore anyway, but what you see on screen is being affected by the kids’ imagination. They’ve read a lot of comics and played a lot of games, so their imagination starts to transform this 1980s tourist attraction into something more fantastical. For them, the local scrap metal yard morphs into an (almost) impenetrable castle, and even their bikes start to act a little like knightly steeds. So the art, like the gameplay, tries to give that feeling of being a kid again, with so much energy and imagination you think you might burst!

Where there any particular games or movies that helped inspire Knights and Bikes?

Yes, we wanted to make a game that felt like The Goonies. A fun, feel-good story about kids working together to hunt for treasure and learn about growing-up and the adult world around them. As the project progressed, it became more of its own thing with a unique setting and atmosphere, but at its core, it’s still a game about being a kid, teaming up with a friend, and going treasure-hunting on your BMX.

In terms of gameplay, our main inspirations came from the Super Nintendo era, where you could pick up a game and get started easily, but more specifically, from timeless classics like Secret Of Mana, for its co-op action gameplay, and also Earthbound—I just love how that title reworks game mechanics into a setting that’s much closer to everyone’s own life experiences of growing up. In other words, it’s a game where you fight school bullies and your own insecurities, rather than orcs and goblins.

How does the co-op gameplay work?

Aside from running or cycling around the island, both of the kids have special abilities that are unique to them. If you play single-player, then you toggle between the kids, and in co-op, you play as one character each. These special abilities include throwing water balloons, creating electric pulses with a broken game controller, playing powerful hip-hop beats on a boombox, or grappling through the scenery with a toilet-plunger on a string. In short,  all the kind of things some kids might use if they had to quickly improvise their own weapons and tools! But the important thing is that all these abilities combine together with the other player. If one player throws a water balloon, then the other can kick it to create a giant splash, or electrify the puddles it leaves behind. There’s a lot of playfulness in how you can combine these interactions, and it’s by using them together that you progress through various levels that are dotted around on the island, solving the puzzles and combat situations in each one.