From the pale court team:
We're here to talk about the development of Pale Court a bit and share our thoughts as we move into the new year.
First, we hope everyone has had an outstanding holiday season, filled with games, gifts, and gratifying victories in the world of Hollow Knight and beyond. The team has been enjoying the holidays and is now coming out of a break period and are back to work on the mod, particularly finishing up Isma, squashing pesky bugs, adding some VFX, and then transitioning to other bosses. Itâs been a wild ride, and weâve still got a lot to do, and weâre eager to get back into the swing of things and start grinding away again.
We would like to remind everyone that the mod is a passion project and, while we would like to get this into the hands of everyone, we do all have school and jobs to attend to. Rest assured we are hard at work and are putting our all into every detail that goes into the mod. As an example, we've had a Zemer attack that's been in for a couple years now but has gone through many different iterations and we just never landed on something that seemed right, whether it be the pattern or fairness to the player, or difficulty of the move. In these cases we'll shelf the move for a bit and move on to other things while we keep it in the back of our mind, but not forgotten.
Moving forward we want to reiterate that we're committed to putting this out and it's still an ongoing project. From attack design, animations, VFX, and character VO, we want to make sure weâre doing everything to the best of our ability for the player in mind. Additionally, the more the team has grown, the more we've had to build our workflow pipeline for playtests to directly give feedback in a concise manner to the software devs. We wanna thank everyone for sticking with us, so weâve included a profile and little dev tidbit for the bosses, continue reading below, and we hope you all have a great day⌠Letâs share some bosses!
Isma is a pretty cool character. When we meet her, she has no visible weapons, so we had to conjure up something completely from scratch. The obvious approach here would be to play off the plant theme and have plant-like attacks, and while this sets the identity of the character, it doesnât set the identity of the fight itself. We ended up taking some inspiration from everyoneâs favorite boss, The Collector. We wanted to look at the boss and see what the strengths and weaknesses were, and how to improve on it. We can see the boss itself tries to spawn mobs and overwhelm the player, but felt it doesnât accomplish the goal of choking the player of comfortability and maneuverability, and we want to change that. We feel like we landed on a really good direction on that pretty early in development and from then on itâs been tuning and tuning and tuning. We feel through this process weâve taken what can be an annoying, monotonous experience and turned it into a very interesting battle with spatial awareness, where you are forced to juggle many different aspects of a fight, or get choked out slowly in the battle. This boss has quickly risen the ranks and become a favorite among the playtesters, and we hope that you guys can enjoy it as much as we did!
Have you ever wondered how Zemer would wield such a HUGE nail and be as elegant as she is? This is what we wanted to do, and man did it quickly become a problem! Originally Zemer was her ânormal sizeâ and her base attacks took up half of the entire playfield. The quickest and easiest approach here was just to shrink her size, so we did, and this opened us up to a lot of fun things. With a smaller size this let us up her mobility through movement options. We also kept the idea of her having this huge nail as well, and in playtests, she felt more like a zoner but with a more physical approach, we expanded on it⌠a lot! She ended up being SO fun in development that we kept thinking up more and more moves for her, and she has probably the most moves of any boss fight in the game. When we started putting up the final touches on her moves we found playtesters were having a very tough time getting ahold of her, but when they did it felt very rewarding and enjoyable. She is a complete menace and we expect it to be the hardest boss and give people a lot of trouble, with a huge sense of satisfaction for those that put in the time and effort to master the fight.
Your favorite thicc boi is back and better than ever - Hegemol has been a very interesting experience for us so far. Failed Champion / False Knight do a great job at physically restricting space, while we touched up about space restriction in Isma, you can think of her as an upward trend, the more time you donât deal with her, the more choked you feel. Hegemol is the constant on the chart, his size will remain an ever present force in your face, and youâre going to have to deal with it the hard way. It was a challenge to really dial in what we wanted to do with Hegemo and, we can see why TC originally took a more basic approach in fear of not overwhelming the player with this monstrous body constantly trying to be on top of you, feeling like a wall closing in. We feel like weâre in a great direction now, and we want to capitalize on this feeling of dealing with an immovable object, as well as being an unstoppable force, while remaining a completely fair fight. Weâre still early in development with Hegemol, but heâs already going to be an interesting case of seeing how players figure out how to cope with the constant pressure.
Weâve had some great fights in Hallownest, and our favorite flavor of fights are sword duels. Hollow Knight has a lot of them, but almost all have some special flavor thrown in there, and we donât really have something with a more âvanillaâ flavor to it. We lacked a fight in the mod that had a very methodical flow to it, almost like a lightsaber duel, or a waterbender with choreographed motions. Enter Dryya, she is our lovechild to a classic sword fight that we think Hollow Knight really needed. Sheâs fast, smooth, and brutal! Being a grounded sword wielder, she wants to constantly be up in your face and on the offensive. On the surface this seems pretty straightforward, but in reality we did have some problems where the knight could dash away or through her and itâs been fun to see how we are getting around that player behavior. We want Dryya to continuously try to engage with the player, and that means minimal time between attacks - she doesnât want you to have any breathing time. If youâre willing to tango, youâll enter a flow state and feel like youâre really having an authentic duel. We hope a more classical fight will have people coming around a lot for an engaging experience.
