Knitted and Inflatable

During my time with Gamebox Incubator, I had to switch teams to find where I could apply my skills and experience after the breakup of Burning House. That’s how I found the talents of KnitKnot Games, who were happy to welcome me as a programmer and lately have let me be project lead. Oh boy, was it a good run!

As our project, we chose to go with the current idea of KnitKnot but flesh it out a bit and iterate on it. What resulted from it was Knitted And Inflatable, a first- shooter game where you have to fight rubber monsters by using the environment and a powerful vacuum gun that can direct the air flow and either push or pull objects and enemies around. For the game’s feel and look, we wanted to make it family-friendly while providing a first-person shooter experience—not something one could see everywhere in the game market.

Working on this project was probably as close as one can get to professional production while being on a student team; we had weekly and bi-weekly meetings where we would discuss milestones, art, systems, game design iterations, and many more aspects and challenges that were rising along our path. KnitKnot Games had an incredibly talented team of coders and designers.

We managed to develop a nice MVP game level that featured puzzles, enemy encounters, cut-scenes, a story synopsis, collectibles, Easter eggs, and air-powered motor boat sequences! Also, obviously, the boss fight sequence at the end, where you had to take down the rubber monster mothership at the end using needle ballistas!

My work, apart from project leading, consisted of production tasks, such as pitch design and preparations and project presentation, and programming tasks, like enemy AI, world interactions, level streaming, Steam configuration, UI development, level building, and code for the motor boat! I think one of the key experiences and skills I gained was pitching the project to stakeholders. We attempted to seek publishers and prepared the pitch deck that we had to present and do this kind of interaction with people who may be interested in our product.

Eventually, our project won the first prize and 1000 USD as the best Gamebox project. It was streamed and evaluated live, including the pitch. Good times!

Massive thanks to Ivan, Anastasia, Irina, Mikhail, Nikita, and Alexey!