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Moo Yu: We met at Media Molecule, working on LittleBigPlanet, and I'd been a fan of his artwork before then, back when I lived in the States (Moo is currently in London). I didn't know who the artist was, back then, and to begin with we didn't work too closely together, but I quickly came to have an appreciation of what he does, and his abilities. When I left Molecule, I was making a little iPhone game, and he helped me with the artwork. That game never came to fruition, but that was when we started working a little more closely. We then made a Facebook game together, Monstrosity, about raising monsters from table-sized things to being able to destroy Paris. That was a lot of fun. He did some icon art for another iPhone game I did. We kept in touch after that, and remained friends.Knights and Bikes has been brewing for, I'd say, two years, in a very passive way. It was one of these things that first came about when we were out for a couple of pints, and Rex mentioned the idea. You usually see these ideas go nowhere, but this one grabbed me immediately, and I began working on it during nights and weekends, asking Rex what he thought of ideas I had as I went along. Every now and then he'd sketch some stuff up. We didn't dedicate any real time to it, but we were always passing ideas back and forth. One time, he scanned in a sketchbook page, and I cut out what images I could and made them into sprites, and made a little prototype where you commanded these little characters on bikes—it was always important to have a gang of kids on bikes. That was made in Unity, I shared it with him, and because he also had Unity, he started putting new assets in. So we've never really dedicated all that much time to it, until recently, but we've been talking about it a lot over the past couple of years.
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I think that EarthBound and Secret of Mana were the first touchstones we discussed—and just like I've never played through all of EarthBound, I don't think he's played all of Secret of Mana. But these are important games to us, from our childhoods, and we wanted to sort of find a game that melds those influences as it passed from one brain to the other. So I've brought things to Knights and Bikes that are based on my experiences of playing Secret of Mana on the SNES. I played through it with my friends, and I want that to be the optimal way to play Knights and Bikes—you with a friend, playing together. I think we're very aware that not everyone will be able to play it in that way, so we're making sure that the single-player experience is just as rewarding as going through it collaboratively. But I think there's really something extra about going through a game together, having to coordinate what you're doing. You end up in arguments, but it's an amazing thing to do with best friends. I used to play Secret of Mana with my best friends, like, once a year until I moved to the UK. It's just one of those games that has so many memories for me, from throughout the ages. It's a shame that there's no network version of it, so I could play through it again with them now.Article continues after the video belowOh, man, I would love Mana on a modern, net-enabled machine. Chrono Trigger is so good on the DS, I wish that Mana was on it, too. Anyway, the setting of Knights and Bikes is interesting to me. I'm from the south of England, and I've holidayed in Cornwall plenty of times, and I have family there. There's something about its history that allows mythology to creep into factual accounts, isn't there? Like Tintagel being the site of King Arthur's birth. What drew you to set the game there?
Well, Rex lives down there, and he grew up on a farm down there before he moved to London to be an artist and make video games. So I think a lot of the decision is drawing from his childhood. But also there's this idea of it being a place where there's enough mystery for you not to know what's real and what isn't, and you blur the two together to make this fantastical world—and that's something we really wanted in the game. One of the great, and slightly horrible, things about childhood is that you just don't know "the rules", so anything is possible – but it's also scary, because you don't know how the world really works. So we're trying to play on both sides of that same coin.
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It's amazing how generous people are being. We're big Kickstarter backers ourselves, so we understand the psychology, but when you're on the receiving side of over a thousand pledges, it's incredible and kind of overwhelming. On top of that, the reaction on Twitter has been unbelievable. So many of our heroes have got behind this.So, one of my favorite games of all time is Beyond Good & Evil, and that game's designer, Michel Ancel, left a comment on our Kickstarter page saying that he's behind us. That's such a surreal moment—I had to post a comment asking if it was the real Michel Ancel. My brain still can't really process it.And finally, you've said the game's made in Unity. To my perhaps naïve brain, that means that it's easier to port from PC and Mac, your launch platforms, to console. Is it fair enough to say that I'll be able to play it on my PS4, sometime? Yeah, I think so, and that's one of the reasons why we chose it, to keep our options open. I think it's something we're thinking about, seriously—we're both experienced in making console games, and we've developed the game for use with a controller. So we've started conversations with the platform holders, but we need to get those discussions across the line. I wouldn't be surprised to see it on consoles, one day. We're weighing up the pros and cons of the various options right now, and working out how much bandwidth we have to play with. If we can only do one console port, we need to work out which one the best is. So we're looking into that.More information on Knights and Bikes can be found on Kickstarter or Foam Sword.Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.