To get the elephant out of the room; yes, I saw the Minecraft movie trailer. Yes, I saw it boosted Gameknight999’s relevancy, and No, I do not have anything special to show for the occasion save for new doodles. Working hard and went through several hurdles (including 5 project restarts and an artstyle change), but a fangame that large takes time when there’s only one person at work.

Alright, for next time, I’ll try some in-game footage of (what is the 5th iteration so far of) the project to showcase the new artstyle we settled on. This time, it will probably go better than the 4 other ones, I can feel it. In the meantime, happy sheepposting, and don’t forget to spread your love for the Gameknight999 series!

Nothing new in terms of Gameknight999 Rebooted, but I may have cooked the single best Gameknight999 April Fools post ever

Hi.

Effective today, I will no longer communicate on Gameknight999 Rebooted’s development until further notice. Progress updates will eventually resume, but for now, no communications. (yes, the March devlog is cancelled too)

By the past, I’ve had myself a tendency to reveal projects way too early. I thought I managed to avoid this for GKR (having a full-on cinematic teaser ready is nothing to scoff at), but after further reconsideration, I DID reveal the game too early. What I’m saying is, instead of rushing out half-baked stuff to meet a monthly update quota and building up hype for a project I believe doesn’t deserve hype in it’s current stage, I want to take a trip back under the rug, and silently work things out to come back stronger later down the line.

This period of silence may result in MAJOR changes for the game; hell, a few days ago, I’ve considered merging books 1 and 2 into one (taking place in a single server, etc) but I’ve quickly abandoned this real silly idea. Other similarly drastic changes like this MAY come up in the future, just saying.

I don’t think there’s anything else to say, other than back to the drawing board. Speaking of drawing, I made this awfully-on-topic doodle today featuring the BftN trio in the flesh. Haven’t got around to introduce yall to reboot Hunter and Crafter, might do so after we surface back.

As a wise man once said, “I’ll be back.”

-Beat-Chan, lead developer of Gameknight999 Rebooted

February 2024 Devlog - A minor distraction (?)

This devlog was originally supposed to be about Gameknight999 Rebooted until my submission to a certain joke game contest on a certain Sonic fangame website ended up taking up most of my time this month. As such, I unfortunately couldn’t get much done on GKR this month, but hey, I’ll make sure to get some good stuff ready next time, alright?

Now that I have your attention, how about I tell a retrospective of my experience in that game jam? I can promise it will be worth it. (since this is not related to GK99R, it won’t be tagged gk999fangame_devlogs like usual)

Context

Sonic Fan-Games HQ (SFGHQ) is the number one Sonic fangame website in the world for years by now, and is most well-known for it’s yearly Sonic Amateur Game Expo (SAGExpo), an online E3-like dedicated not only to Sonic fangames, but also fangames of other IPs as well as indie games.

For a while now, SFGHQ has been regularly organizing Really Amateur Games Expo (RAGE), a side-event dedicated to Sonic joke games. Unlike the main event, RAGE is basically a game jam; people have 14 days to make a Sonic joke game following a given theme, and SAGE hosts livestream themselves playing through the games. For example, RAGE 2024’s theme was “Sonic Mania 2”, and the games were streamed by MotorRoach on February 17th.

I originally didn’t intend to participate to that year’s RAGE (I never even did a single Game Jam once in my entire life) until I rewatched past streams of Rummy (former SAGExpo host, very cool guy) playing old RAGE submissions. I told myself “god, it would be awesome if he laughed like that at MY game” and so I set off for my first RAGE, and first real game jam… 6 days late. Only 8 days left to make Sonic Mania 2 from scratch.

A troubled development

My submission was originally going to be called “Sonic Mania 2” until I actually started making the logo; at that time, I settled on the Mania soundalike “Majonga”, for a full title of “Sonic Majonga”. I later added the sub-title “The Trial” after rewatching the RAGE playthrough of Melpontro’s INSANE 2019 submission, to imply that my game wasn’t actually finished and only a trial version of a much larger thing yet to come.

From beginning to end, I had NOTHING even close to a project outline, and work was done in a real erratic order based on what I felt like working on: the title screen was ready before I even started working on the character controller, the last cutscene was done before the first, the second level was the last “scene” made from a chronological standpoint, etc.

This became a problem roughly three days before the deadline, when I ended up having pretty much everything ready, save from the actual levels. I had to rush things real hard to meet the deadline, and the level design for these levels more than suffered from it. At least, from other people’s playthroughs, the levels took a balanced amount of time to clear; not too long, not too short. I still wish I had time to add more stuff in (springs, other varieties of enemies, speed shoes).

Gameplay mechanics

I’ll get straight to the point here: I have no idea of how Sonic physics work, and can’t even work with pre-made Sonic engines (Sonic Worlds, etc.). So, I decided to just not use Sonic physics at all, and make a regular platformer character controller. I am not the only one to do that by the way, “Sonic” games without the physics are commonplace at RAGE. I still ended up referencing this paradox in the actual submission through a non-functional, purely decorative loop with the text “imagine having functional loops in a RAGE game”.

To compensate, I attempted to make the playables as unique as I could as well as add a touch of innovation there and there. Sonic’s biggest changes revolved around the ground spin attack being replaced with the SA2 somersault attack. Due to a lack of time, I decided to make the drop dash and spin dash also go into a somersault. Knuckles cannot climb walls from a glide, but gets a dash punch, ground pound, and uppercut (now also usable mid-air as a makeshift double jump!). I also coded in small physics differences for each character, such as Knuckles having a lower top speed than Sonic.

The game’s real big gameplay addition was Tails going from a semi-controllable CPU follower to a gun minigame; if playing as Sonic and Tails, the mouse will behave as a cowboy shooter minigame, where clicking around the screen can shoot down and destroy enemies and obstacles. You also have to handle an ammo gauge in the top-right, which can be reloaded at any time with right-click. There is also a hastly-implemented combo meter that’s even programmed to not drain while mid-air, so you can theorically keep the same combo going for an entire stage with a bit of skillful movement.

Jokes galore

My number one objective for this game was to put a LOT of references and in-jokes. I often ended up naturally adding in jokes there and there while developing the game, so that wasn’t really all that hard. Most infamously, it is filled to the brim with Scott Pilgrim jokes and references; most notable one is the title screen animation included the movie scene of Scott Pilgrim tying his shoes with Sonic’s head edited in, and MotorRoach’s chat went absolutely WILD when this part came on.

There’s also various references to several past RAGE entries: These go from “Green Hill Man Man” from the eponymous RAGE 2018 submission ominously staring at you in G.Hill Act 1’s background, or sprites of Cory in the House and Bradfordhound appearing inside the gold ring sprites (referencing Dankles’ amazing Cory In The Ded 3.5 game). The one I am most proud of is the SEGA executive from 2022’s “Operation Shadow Shoot” making a cameo at the end of the game, which prompted a reaction in chat from Rummy himself (who previously played Shadow Shoot at RAGE 2022 and lost his mind over it).

Other jokes were simply based on stuff I had in mind at that time. For example, the Sonic eyebrow face plastered all over the game was a Discord emoji I used for a lot of time, and the boss battle theme is the audio of “ytpmv elf”, my favourite ytp of all times.

The future of the game

The game was streamed alongside other RAGE entries on February 17th at MotorRoach’s twitch. In order to keep screentime even between all submission, MotorRoach couldn’t showcase every piece of content that’s available in the game during his playthrough (missing content include playable characters, alternate level routes, etc). So, even if you watched him play the game, there are still secrets waiting for you in there, including a big one that permanently (though subtly) alters your copy of the game.

One day after the full stream of the games, I was so proud of the game I decided to publish the game on itch.io ahead of RAGE’s results, following the example of all my fellas on SFGHQ’s discord. This was not only my first real game jam, but I also somewhat managed to accomplish my original goal: while Rummy wasn’t the one playing the game, he still had a really positive reaction to it, and that’s absolutely priceless to me.

I originally didn’t really intend to update the game after the game jam (I thought I would just finish it, submit it, watch the reactions and never think about it again), but I had so much fun working on this and am really proud of what I had done, as flawed as it is. I genuinely want to keep working on this! First thing I will have to do though, is cleaning up and refractoring the engine (preferably from the ground up on a blank slate) as it was thrown together hastily with no regards toward working on a large scale.

This project won’t have a major impact on my work on Gameknight999 Rebooted, as the latter remains obviously my main project; nonetheless, I still want to dedicate Majonga’s future expansions a bit of my time, and will thus work on both projects side-by-side for the time being. Don’t worry, GKR is still in the works, and I can say with certitude that I should have some nice stuff to show by next month!

Post closer

If you somehow read through all of this, I sincerly apologize for not adding any images. Otherwise, I don’t really have a really good way of closing things out, but if you wanna try out the game while waiting for the next GKR devlog, it’s available on itch.io right now!

January 2024 Devlog - Getting our bearings

Alright, we know, it’s been already one (1) month since the trailer dropped and we have been kind of silent so far. In reality, we are doing work under the hood, and I’ve already shared some of the work I’ve done to a smaller circle of friends; I decided that most of it didn’t warrant being shared publicy for now (due to being too early, requiring polish, etc.), and a lot of it will indeed remain under the hood for a time. But I think y'all warrant a devlog for once, so I will try and be as transparent as possible:

What you just saw was the first public, in-engine prototype footage for the game. Most of the focus so far was toward now only getting our sweet sweet models to look nice in Godot (which we somehow mostly managed to do save for issues with Godot’s shadows system), but to also establish an optimal Blender-to-Godot pipeline so that getting these assets in the game would require the least effort possible for the sake of letting more effort go toward the quality of assets. We didn’t manage to establish such a pipeline (yet). Game development sure would be amazing if you could just get your carefully crafted characters and animations in-engine with a simple click, amirite?

Alright, so, what else do we do in Godot? We develop the engine that will power our upcoming, innovative battle system, of course. We originally went for building the engine inside the game’s main “project” (if you’re confused, it’s just some high-level indie dev slang) until we realised this, as well as the experimentation that comes with it, would negatively affect things for the main project. Also, using placeholder assets would be more efficient, but we’re reluctant to fill the future foundation of the game with tons of useless dev garbage. So, we decided to start rebuilding allat gameplay stuff in a separate secondary project, which will be used from now on to develop our snazzy super secret revolutionary combat gameplay.

Now, a lot of the work behind the scenes wasn’t consacred to the engine itself (definitely not a bad workflow guys, trust me!); under the hood, we also worked further on the aesthetic side of things: chara designs, new models, etc… As you might have guessed, aesthetics are something real important to us. Hell, we literally intended the artstyle to be the big selling point of the project, especially to our fellow Minecraft enjoyers out there that have no idea of what a “gameknight999” even is, but care about the project regardless because it could very well end up the first good ambitious MC fangame since Story Mode. Obviously, that means when it comes to adapting existing characters, we usually make em snazzy new designs to match the vibe of the game:

Beyond their designs, we also intend to make a lot more changes to several existing creatures for the sake of fitting the game’s brand new vibe. Take the skeletons for example: in Minecraft, while the skeleton is very common and iconic, it isn’t really considered a real “basic” enemy (it’s literally a ranged attacker), especially when put next to the zombie, who easily takes the cake as MC’s most basic enemy. In GKR, we decided to make skeletons able to wield a variety of weapons other than bows (swords, shields, etc.), consolidating them as the “shoto” units of the monster faction, and some of the more versatile goons Gameknight will have to face during his adventure. This is the kind of changes you will see in other aspects of Minecraft as we picture it for the reboot, offering a brand new take on the game you’re used to (in total non-respect to the original Gameknight999 series which just adapted plain-ol’ Minecraft as it was back in 2014).

So, in the end, what can you make of all of this?
1) So far, we’ve mostly worked on getting our bearings in this engine.
2) We are currently working on getting the core gameplay system to a playable state.
3) Our artstyle is awesome.

Also, for those who didn’t realize until now, the fancy skeleton model wasn’t made by me this time; you have to thank our new 3D modeller, Lucas “Geno” ATBK, who I previously got to work with for Mega Man Zero Online Legacy. He’s also developing a very cool speed platformer called “Lunar Leaf”, you should REALLY check that out and more at https://www.youtube.com/@LukasATBK

Hopefully I covered everything there was to cover, and did not make any spelling mistakes. No Youtube uploads for the time being, but we hope to be back as soon as humanly possible with some cool new development updates.

-Beat-Chan, lead developer of Gameknight999 Rebooted

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Gameknight999 Fangame on Tumblr (real)

Hey, it’s Jack. People kept asking for an official blog so I went ahead and created one at @gk999fangame; since we’re the only GK fangame, pretty sure most people won’t mind. Please understand I am not good at using this app, like, who even designed this ui?

We’ll be posting pretty much anything and everything related to the Gameknight999 fangame here. Obviously devlogs, screenshots and WIP footage, but likely also other stuff related to GK999 or it’s community. After all, community’s honors, am I right?

Ok, good enough for an opener, anyone knows how do I send this garbage now?