The Knightling interview: Twirlbound’s CEO thinks maybe we all need a bit more color in our lives

Last week, amongst the hype for Silksong and the other games that landed on storefronts, a small open-world adventure dropped. The Knightling is a cute, incredibly tight, controlling game that I praised highly whenever it really dipped its toes into the platforming arena. The Escapist’s own Em Stonham reviewed it too, calling it a “modern gem”.

So after a few hours of exploring and sliding about on the shield, I had to dig into the game a little more. I spoke with Matthijs van de Laar, the CEO of Twirlbound and Creative Director and Writer on The Knightling.

The Knightling has excellent movement

As I mentioned, the platforming in The Knightling is stupendous. It moves how you’d want something in this style to, and the added elements like the shield slide really bring the whole thing together. It’s never boring to go exploring in The Knightling. van de Laar told me that the inspiration came from the shape of the shield, which in turn led to the rest of the game forming around it:

“The sliding was inspired by the design and shape of the shield – it simply invited us to think about fun and creative ways we could use it, and sliding was instantly part of that!

“The platforming and movement were a constant iteration, trying to get it just right. A lot of it is the level design as well, making sure the gameplay ingredients and distances (metrics) are tight so that the player feels in control.”

Part of The Knightling’s charm comes from the characters’ muffled voices. Only the shield is fully voiced throughout the game, giving this pseudo-classic, old Zelda game a feeling to the adventure. I was curious how they managed this, but it turns out it was as simple as covering their mouths. The old Kenny McCormick method, with some covering their mouths with a cloth:

“It’s actually quite hard to do, while also coming up with a sensible sentence that sounds proper but not like actual language. Sometimes we’d have to give voice directions that involved “folding the cloth once more” to get the sound just right.”

How to stand out in a video game flood

However, as we’ve written repeatedly in recent months, games are coming out too fast and in massive abundance. Certain studios might take their time, but if you head to the homepage of Steam, you’ll see just how overcrowded things can get. Twirlbound’s CEO doesn’t seem too phased, as he believes that The Knightling will get the attention it deserves thanks to what it’s putting down:

“We’re happy to see the positive reception to our colorful game – maybe we all need a bit more
color in our lives. We’ve noticed that mechanics like the slide do really well to intrigue people quite quickly, and that generally games with more unique mechanics do well, which is something indies can excel at.

“It always remains a challenge to find the biggest possible audience and one that fits the game, but with The Knightling, we’ve been super happy with the response!”

From Pine to Knightling, lessons learnt from development

Prior to The Knightling, Twirlbound also worked on Pine, another open-world game that focused on its world simulations. That was six years ago, in 2019, so what lessons had the team learnt since then?

“There were a few core things we wanted to tackle right out of the gate. Firstly, Pine is a heavily
systemic game, which meant a lot of our development efforts went into the simulation and the way the world worked. This left us with less time for moment-to-moment gameplay like traversal and combat.

“In a way, The Knightling is a direct response to that: we wanted to make something that
instantly felt good to play, and where players would constantly enjoy moving around.

“Another lesson was that Pine was probably too open from the get-go, making it hard to build
meaningful player progression. The Knightling gates its regions and mechanics a bit more, keeping everything fresh throughout the game.”

The team has since taken even more lessons away with them since The Knightling finished development. With the game’s never-boring-to-explore motif, van de Laar mentions that the game’s movement is probably something they’ll take into the future:

“Strong movement mechanics in open world action adventure games like ours is a very important core. It means that moving from A to B, from quest to quest, is always a joy – and that’s how players will spend most of their time. So we definitely want to keep spending a lot of time on that in the future!”