Image source from Hollow Knight by Team Cherry (2017)
It was the shared nostalgia for a “classic game” that pushed three Australian game developers to make their own studio, Team Cherry, in 2012. Ari Gibson, William Pellen, and David Kazi from Adelaide bonded over Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, while brainstorming what would’ve become a hot-selling title and one of the best representatives of the glorious metroidvania game genre. Nonetheless, like many successful studios, this one came from simple, humble beginnings as well.
Combining a game-jamming mentality with massive animation talent, Team Cherry broke into the large leagues in 2014–15 aided by their very successful Kickstarter campaign and diverse stretch goals. More than delivering on their early promise, Hollow Knight was released in February 2017 and is keeping half-a-million side-scrolling, bug-zapping gamers very enthusiastic.
Image source from Hollow Knight by Team Cherry (2017)
Wicked, wonderful, and just plain weird, Hollow Knight can be a challenging and artful insect-based adventure. As a cute little bug, you go up against deadly creatures and complicated traps while unraveling the mysteries in fungal wastes, bone temples, and ruined “gothic-like” underground cities. Buying maps along the way, you wield the Knight’s nail, a sword-like weapon, to keep wondrous enemies and fearful bosses at bay.
The game emphasizes skill and exploration across the vast, interconnected underground kingdom known as Hallownest. The key element the developers were interested in reproducing was the sense of going on a grand adventure in a strange land full of monsters and funny characters and secret nooks and crannies, in order to convey the feeling of forging your own path in uncharted territory and having to face unknown dangers.
Brought to life by stunning visuals, Hollow Knight has been well received by critics, holding an aggregate score of 86/100 on Metacritic, and described by one PC Gamer critic as “the most beautiful hand drawn game [he’d] ever played.” Another reviewer lauded the gameplay too: “Hollow Knight knocks it out of the park in terms of gameplay and presentation with a number of the most effective 2D animation I've seen for a game.”
Hollow Knight is a superb reminder that lovely games don’t necessarily must target grand technical achievements. Team Cherry decided to require full advantage of built-in development tools in Unity and extensions available on the Asset Store so as to satisfy their technical goals. This allowed them to concentrate on what they're best at: creating stunning art. They produced the striking visual style from hand-drawn art and traditional animation created in Photoshop and saved as simple PNGs. Then they assigned a couple of easy shader types including sprite_default and sprite_diffuse with minor modifications to those assets. Rather than using complex 3D lighting systems, they handled lighting with soft transparent shapes. The team built levels with 2D assets layered in an exceedingly 3D environment using many of Unity’s out-of-the-box 2D features, including 2D Physics, Sprite Packer, and therefore the Particle System with the assistance of the 2D Toolkit from the Asset Store.
While the team does have some coding experience and did write custom scripts, they created all the enemies and interactive elements using Playmaker, a five-star visual-scripting package.