Yesterday, we asked what was up with Knights: Spiral Island. It was a promising FPS headed to PC with potential spin-offs set to hit handheld devices like, say, the iPhone and iPod Touch. Game creator Playground State had attempted to fund the development of Spiral Islands via the might of Kickstarter’s Internet crowd sourcing, but when the studio failed to gather the capital it desired, we thought the project was in trouble.
I’m still not sure about how well the studio fares post-funding failure, but I do know this: an iOS spin-off title based in the Knights universe is still in the works right now. It’s just a week old, yet the final build projected to hit in about five weeks. It’ll be using the UDK.
“… as of the past [seven] days, we have been developing an iOS-specific version of the game Knights called Jump Knight Missions,” studio co-founder and lead artist Barry Collins confirmed to us via an e-mail response to our original inquiry about the project.
Collins shot us a slice of the Jump Knight Missions design document. Jump Knight is an objective-based FPS that combines conventional genre action to “touch tasks,” a phrase that describes the little things you’ll be doing when you’re not killing dudes or exploring the world.
According to the document, about half the game will be composed of these tasks ranging from ‘defuse the mine,’ to ‘hand food to the soldier,’ to “give a high-five” to a soldier who “killed 20 zombies and saved 30 women and children.” The other half is action.
You’ll get points for accomplishing these minor objectives and even more if you can do it without flaw or within a set time limit. Each Mission will have around ten of these tasks, with the first and second missions sharing over that amount.
I’m told that a lot of progress has been made within this super short time frame. I get the sense that the first two missions are very close, or already, content complete. And here’s the cool thing about them: they’ll be set in totally different places, which makes me think that the team isn’t ready to drop the bite-sized, one-style-or-place-per-content-chunk idea that made Spiral Islands so appealing in the first place.
Considering that the project is a mere week old, I wouldn’t be surprised if anything that you’ve read changes in the coming days before final release. We’ll be keeping in contact and watching development from our desk chairs, though, so stay tuned.
