Early on, I experimented with having the sword rotation tied to mouse position, similar to Getting Over It, but to me, that made the game lack a sense of weight and made the controls too finicky. I think the feeling of weight is what really makes the mechanics stand out.
Each sword is not only longer than the previous sword, but also feels heavier, affecting your center of balance and how much it affects the knight’s movements. I had to carefully tune different weights, sizes, friction forces, bounce factors, and rotational torque to create the current mechanics feel. Moving the knight moves the sword, and moving the sword moves the knight. The knight and their sword are connected and have different weights associated with them.
Ha: Deepest Sword’s sword-swinging mechanic is heavily physics based. What thoughts went into creating the sword-swinging move mechanic? In creating the finer details of dropping out in mid-swing, using the pivot for momentum, etc? In giving players options within their swing? This also made it easier for me to design different stages since I could focus purely on designing puzzles that used the sword climbing mechanic and reduced the number of variables I’d need to tune to make the puzzles feel satisfying. By removing the ability to jump, we narrowed the player's movement set and made it so the player had to engage with our core mechanic rather than rely on traditional platforming knowledge. Originally, the knight was actually able to jump, but I decided to remove jumping so that the game could be more focused on puzzle platforming. Once I got it working, I knew it felt unique and fun to execute. It took a lot of tuning and playing with physics to actually make it so the sword could grip surfaces and climb the way it does. As I was prototyping the movement I thought, “What if we can use the sword to bridge gaps and reach further platforms? It’s easy enough to make the sword reach the other side of the gap, but how does the knight actually use that to get across?” Since we were working in 2D, I figured rotating the sword around the player made the most sense and this naturally led to this kind of circular swinging motion that enables the knight to vault over distances. Ha: I knew we wanted to make the sword get longer and longer as you played the game, so I wanted to have a mechanic that took advantage of that aspect somehow. What inspired you to tie movement to swinging a sword around? Game Developer spoke with Vu Ha, Rose Peng, and Johan Soriao, developers of the challenging game, to talk about how they came up with the idea of traversing levels by swinging a sword, the thoughts that went into designing a world that would force players to use those swings in clever ways, and the challenges of building the sword-swinging mechanic.
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