Falmouth Alumni releases new adventure game on Steam
04 October 2024
Three former Games Academy graduates have released their first game, Leximan, from their game studio Knights of Borria.
Leximan was released this August through publisher Marvellous Europe, and has already amassed dozens of positive reviews on Steam.
Some background around the formation of Knights of Borria, and the announcement of the Leximan title can be found in a news article from last June.
We caught up with Chris Jones, who is also an associate lecturer at the Games Academy to get a flavour of how the game was made.
Tell us about Knights of Borria’s new game, Leximan
The game is a wholesome narrative adventure game with a 2D retro feel. You play as Leximan, crafting spells by combining floating fragments of words to solve puzzles, as well as embarking on a number of minigames that cross genres.
The game draws inspiration from several other games, such as Undertale and the soundtrack from EarthBound. The original prototype came out of a Game Jam constraint and can still be found on Itch.
How does this fit into other releases from the Knights of Borria?
This is actually our first released game. It was always intended to be a smaller project but due to this being our first title it took a little longer than we anticipated!
Who was involved in making the game?
The core development team was made up of Jake Whittaker, Max Amaden and myself – all graduates from the Games Academy. We pitched to Marvelous Europe, and they accepted our game pitch, so we were involved with a production and marketing team from Marvelous (who are absolutely lovely people).
The game started in the incubator programme that was run by Nick Dixon and then transitioned to be under Steve Stopps with a different name. They helped us with refining our pitch deck and were a constant source of information and guidance during the initial pitching process. A core member of that team was Colin Mitchell who helped us enormously during those days, especially with bouncing ideas back and forth.
What was the secret of keeping the project to plan? I imagine there were a lot of moving parts in the project!
Daily standups, regular communication and a structured plan for meetings, as well as a living roadmap was crucial to keeping the project moving. Honestly, if you go into game development without a plan of how you're going to move forward, or any sort of roadmap, it will be infinitely harder.
What's next for Knights of Borria?
Right now, we're keeping an eye on Leximan with a few patches and then we're going to take a small break to get to grips with a new game engine called Godot before diving back into whatever our next title is going to be!
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