Soar to New Heights with The King’s Bird Today on Xbox One

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Xbox Wire.

I co-founded Serenity Forge along with a couple of friends a few years ago; and since then we’ve co-developed games like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and the upcoming Once Upon a Coma, as well as ported and published games like A Case of Distrust, Four Sided Fantasy, and Lifeless Planet.

The King’s Bird has a special place in our hearts because it’s one of the first original ideas that we conceived, way back when we were literally working out of a basement. The goal was simple: we wanted to create a precision-platformer in the realm of indie hits like Dustforce and Super Meat Boy, but we wanted it to have a big emphasis on the flow and beauty of movement. The physics and momentum-heavy gameplay has been one of the game’s most commonly praised elements by fans and press alike, so we’re super happy to see people loving exactly what we aimed to achieve!

Another major element we wanted to emphasize was artistic appeal. This was especially challenging when we first started developing the game because we didn’t officially have an artist on board! We knew we had to keep the style minimalistic due to our constraints, but still wanted the levels to be pleasant to look at. Fortunately, as the years went by and our art team grew, the game’s quality of assets improved alongside everything else. And along with the help of our publisher, Graffiti Games, we were finally able to push the game out on time in our final year of development.

Lastly, I’m extremely happy to see this game being released on Xbox One. I remember how inspired I was when I binged through Ori and the Blind Forest on Xbox One in one night together with our creative director, Dian. When I later looked up how well Ori did, I knew that a ton of Xbox One fans would have appreciation for more artistic 2D experiences. My team have also met and talked to a lot of people working on the ID@Xbox team over the years, and knew that they were all very passionate about artistic indie games as well. I’m so glad that after so many years, I’m finally seeing The King’s Bird released on Xbox One, and I really hope that you enjoy its challenging-but-rewarding gameplay on this console!