Making a retro-style platformer that plays like it’s from today

Innovating nostalgia

Our studio slogan is innovating nostalgia. We grew up on Castlevania, Mega Man, Mario 3, and the NES and Sega era platformers, and ChivalBee is our way of building on them, not copying them. The drill mechanic comes from the drop kick you get with a double jump in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

ChivalBee borrows the warmth of the platformers we grew up on, then leaves a window open. A cheerful world is the best place to hide something unsettling, and I want the charm to feel a little less safe the longer you look at it.

I used modern tools to protect an old look

The game is built with depth. The environment has a Z-axis, which lets me stagger background layers into parallax that feels three-dimensional while you play a side-scrolling, two-dimensional game. The art itself stays two-dimensional.

I lean on shader graphs and procedural generation while staying rooted in a retro-style game. Shaders create the fluids and flames. I choose which objects receive them and handcraft the shaders and materials for each, which keeps out the gradients and smooth edges that would clash with a 32-bit-era look. We wrote our own movement speed, physics and gravity.

I want players to see the artistry, and to be surprised

I want players to see the artistry in the hand-drawn animation, and to see that modern techniques can keep the heart of a retro visual language. I want them to play something that feels like it belongs to a different time but plays like something from today.

The game is built on juxtapositions: depth in a side-scrolling world, shader graphs and procedural generation rooted in a retro style, and a cute surface with more underneath. I like subverting expectations and catching people off guard in clever, organic ways.

A game that looks like this is expected to be a certain kind of game, and I like to quietly disagree. That small gap between what the world promises and what it delivers is what makes people curious about it. I’m building a world I hope players keep talking about, why it is the way it is and how it came to be, long after they’ve finished playing.

I made the world and the look, and my co-director made it work

I created the world, the characters and the direction for the whole game. I handle every visual: the animation, the character designs and illustrations, the interface, and the promotional work and social media. My co-director focuses on the technical side, making sure the mechanics work and feel smooth, and he handles level design. A composer joined specifically for this game.

We’re also putting our connections in games media to work, bringing attention to the game and building toward its release. I spent three years researching and writing for Game Theory, and I have ties to Matthew Patrick, Stephanie Patrick and the Theorist Media team. My co-director hosts Dave Control, which goes well beyond Dark Souls lore into long-form analysis of game design and mechanics, and he has connections in the YouTube creator community, at Limited Run Games and in the GameSpot journalism scene, among others. Those ties will help support the game when it becomes available.

Where it stands

ChivalBee is in development. We’re aiming at Nintendo Switch and PC, with PlayStation and Xbox as possibilities. We have a growing audience on YouTube and Instagram, and my co-director’s channels bring in followers as well.

Believable takes more work than it looks

Working on ChivalBee has shown me how much goes into making every small thing look, feel and behave in a believable way, even in a world full of anthropomorphic insects. You still have to create the suspension of disbelief that makes people care about what they’re doing and who they’re doing it for.

Every interaction and every background element affects the player’s experience. Players rarely see how much has to be thought through to make a 2D retro-style platformer feel immersive, with strong storytelling in its environmental design.

I carry that into everything I design, and into the next game I make. A product is also a world. Someone spends their working day or their free time inside it, and every choice in the interface tells them what kind of place it is. Designing an application and designing a forest for a bee knight begin with the same question: does this feel like somewhere real? Building a world through the lens of an application is not so different from building one with anthropomorphic bugs, magic and swords, and holding both practices at once is a unique perspective that I bring to the table.