Crews of rebellious brawlers roam the streets battling for dodgeball dominance. It’s a universe we want to be in, relentlessly optimistic, taking the unserious totally seriously. Knockout City doesn’t exist in the real world or at any specific place in time. PSU: As it’s a live-service experience, there’s typically no story involved, so what’s the story and lore within Knockout City? We have a lot more in the works to release over the coming months during our live updates. What’s cool for us is seeing our community incorporate ball times into unique team and individual strategies. Something new to learn and master, and with personality.
Each ball type is designed to have unique advantages and trade-offs. Our whole development approach is starting from the core, and layering mechanics while maintaining balance. Then there were map designs, ball density, and ball functions. Then we built on the base with dodging, charging, ultimate throws, and various moves and interrupts. That started from the very core of the game: throwing, catching, and passing. PSU: Following on from that, the gameplay mechanics are finely tuned, what was the process for balancing the characters and balls so they didn’t feel under-or-over powered?īalancing was a major thing we knew we had to get right. Viper is super fast, lightweight and lets us manage server authoritative competitive gaming across platforms and a range of internet latencies. It just wasn’t possible, to our knowledge, with any existing commercial engine. We knew that we needed our engine to run a live distributed deterministic physics simulation with many physics objects (balls) with travel time, collision, where the player can also be a physics object. We’re all about finding something special about the way a game feels and plays first, and then working to find a technical solution to deliver that experience. Turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to do! We created our own proprietary engine from scratch, called the Viper engine, to pull it off from a technical perspective. We quickly realized how ambitious we were when testing out just how throwing and catching balls might work over the internet. PSU: Dodgeball is a beloved and popular sport, so translating that into a video game format must’ve been difficult! Was there any major challenges during development? This includes not only the creative vision, but also cool features that can bring friends together like cross play and cross progression. What impressed us is that everyone at EA plays. They really saw and understood the vision for Knockout City.
Our vision for Velan Studios is to create breakthrough games that are magic, where “playing is believing”. But it has been very rewarding to release our own IP and to have the support of EA behind us. Many of our team worked on several of the most innovative game franchises of the last 20 years including Skylanders and Guitar Hero, and our last game before Knockout City was Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. Knockout City has been an amazing experience and we’re so excited to continue expanding on it long past launch. PSU: This is your first major game release with your own, created IP, could you tell us how it felt to work on such an ambitious project, as well as your experience with EA?
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