April 9, 2025|

Filed under: Featured, Straight from the Source (Interview)

Straight from the Source: Ari Gibson & William Pellen (Team Cherry)

In this edition of Straight From the Source, we have reached into the Source Gaming Vaults and are finally releasing an interview we conducted with Team Cherry Co-Directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen.

In this interview, we asked the duo about the localisation of Hollow Knight into non-English languages, their NES inspirations for the game, the kickstarter and what it means to them to be an ‘indie developer’.

This interview was conducted at BitSummit 2018, one year after Hollow Knight came out on PC and before it made its debut on Nintendo Switch. Hosting the interview from Source Gaming’s side were PushDustIn and Brando, and editing was done by NantenJex.

A special thank you goes out to mossbag for helping with the transcription, and for being very patient with us on the release of this interview. If you would like to hear the uncut, raw audio, it has been uploaded to his archive channel to listen to.

Hollow Knight (2017)

What have you both been up to at this years BitSummit (2018)?

Ari: We did a short talk on the stage with another game developer from Adelaide. His name is Matt Trobiani, he made a game called Hacknet that was a big success on Steam. And I mean, ultimately, we obviously love indie games and this was just a good opportunity to…

William: …to come and play stuff and to come and see Japan again.

Ari: Yeah, yeah. And to connect with some of the people that we’ve been working with like Kakehashi Games, who did the Japanese translation and the localization for Hollow Knight. They’re obviously helping with a lot of stuff on this side of the world.

So there was a blog post from you guys, dated March 24th 2018 that coincided with the Lifeblood Public Beta, and it was here that you guys were talking about the Japanese language being added.

So we were wondering, when you guys were initially creating the game did you expect it to become this international, to the point where it has 10 supported languages?

William: We always wanted the ability for anyone to be able to play Hollow Knight. So we made it with that in mind.

Ari: It is in more languages than we probably expected. I believe it’s in 10 languages, yeah. And a lot of that has actually been through the help of fans and through the community coming to us, and saying we really want it in Brazilian, Portuguese and languages like that. It tells us there is a community here.

William: We just set up a system where fans could come in and just work through the text of the game themselves and translate it. We worked with them on it of course. It’s been a really cool process. So basically, a lot of the translations were kind of driven by the fans.

Ari: That’s true. In fact, we paid for some translations and then fans ended up coming to us and saying “this is awful. We will help you fix it.” And they did. And they did an incredible job too.

That’s awesome. How did this process work? You got the fan translations come in and then do you go back through and edit them?

Ari: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of those fans have now, because we’ve been releasing additional content packs, just become the translators for their respective languages. So we have incredible German, French and Italian translators that we hired through this method.

William: They’re people who had already played the game and were really passionate about it. We got these translations that had heaps of thought going into them. Like, with all the poetry and the songs and stuff. They worked with us and they worked really hard to translate it really well, and to maintain the meaning of it all. They did a great job because this stuff really meant a bit to them.

What was the localization process like for the Japanese version specifically? Was that process kind of similar?

William: That was a bit different because we worked with Kakehashi Games here. So they’re helping us with the publishing in Japan and liaising with, like, Nintendo of Japan and the Japanese media. And as part of that, they had an in-house translation team work on it.

Ari: Yeah, so sorry it was not all fan translations. The guys at Kakehashi Games are very professional translators. They’ve done it for hundreds and hundreds of games. They really know what they’re doing.

Hollow Knight (2017)

Okay, so switching gears a little bit here. With the Kickstarter, I believe you guys raised around like AU$58,000?

William: Yeah.

To us, that kind of seems like a pretty modest budget considering what the game achieved and how it’s grown. So whenever you set your initial goal, which was even lower than what you guys got, was that really a number you guys were comfortable with? In a“we can do everything we want now” kind of way?

Ari: Yeah, it was a number we were comfortable with for the scale of game that we intended to make at the time. So, the goal that we set was something like AU$35,000.

William: Yeah, we were debating it before the kickstarter. I think we changed it up from like AU$30,000 a few days before it went live. We were debating that for a while.

Ari: But that number was to create a Metroidvania that was very small. It was really like a small thing.

William: Like two hours or something.

Ari: And then the success of the campaign allowed us to make it a level bigger. And then because of funding that we got entirely from that campaign, it allowed us to work for a period of two years, essentially, and that allowed the game to get bigger again.

So, the simple answer is, yes, that that budget did sustain us but it was because of our specific situation. We don’t have children and William has a partner that works full time. I had an animation business before that [Mechanical Apple] was quite successful, so I had some money to survive on from that. And then David, the third member of the Hollow Knight development team (who did the foundational architectural coding stuff), his partner also worked full time as an architect.

Then probably the other part of all this that helped us was living in Adelaide, where the cost of living is very cheap. So there were a number of factors that worked for us and allowed us to make a game like Hollow Knight on quite a low budget.

As we got right towards the end, we said, “look, there are all these extra things we really want to get in there but they aren’t essential for us to release the game.” But they were things we thought would make the game really great and for that, we actually approached Indie Fund, which is a funding syndicate. The guys there were very eager to be involved and so they also helped us. They provided a little bit more financing and that allowed us to add all those extra little bits that we really wanted to include.

On your Kickstarter page, you guys mentioned that you bonded over a level of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. So we were wondering, what inspiration, if any, from Zelda II did you draw upon for Hollow Knight? Was there something special in that game that you couldn’t find in Hollow Knight’s other inspirations, like Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night?

Ari: Well, for starters it’s not as isolated an experience as Metroid is. Zelda II has the town aspect, where you can meet a lot of little characters.

William: And there’s the vastness of its world.

Ari: Yeah, that’s true. It has a big, expansive world. The main thing we like about games like Zelda II is that feeling of exploration and discovery and not being able to feel the edges of it.

William: Yeah. Yeah. Like, legitimately not knowing…

Ari: …what you’re going into.

William: Yeah. Yeah. At each step that felt really nice.

So not necessarily the elements of Zelda II like the temples, but other aspects of that game?

William: Yeah, the game has a cool structure to it but it’s not one that we wanted to use. No, it’s more about the feeling of the quest across an epic land.

Ari: Hollow Knight actually ended up having a lot of influence from some other games of that era as well, like Mega Man. It’s probably quite evident when you play the game. Maybe it even has a Mega Man X feel to it.

William: Mega Man Zero as well.

Ari: And another game called Faxanadu, which is beloved in some places.

William: It’s another NES game similar to Zelda II.

Ari: Yeah, they have similar qualities.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987)

Why is the terrain in Hollow Knight all in straight lines and rectangles? Was that a deliberate design choice?

Ari: That was a deliberate design choice from the very start. Hollow Knight is influenced by NES-era games and it’s intended to have the qualities of NES-era games like Faxandu, which are obviously quite a tile based.

It also works well in creating a really precise feeling game. It works well for legibility, being able to judge distances, for being able to judge behaviors. The gameplay isn’t soft in that way.

William: Yeah, when we started development one of the decisions we made was that kind of really straight terrain. The player character would move in a way that’s kind of like digital, Like Mega Man or something, where he hasn’t really got acceleration or deceleration. The movement is really snappy and the terrain helped make that quick movement super readable. It allowed us to demand much more from a player, in terms of what we’re asking them to do in battles, their reaction times and stuff.

Ari: Yeah, there’s just no fuzziness about the gameplay. So when you do make a mistake, you don’t feel too frustrated at the game. You can just feel frustrated that you’ve perhaps missed an input.

After the success of the kickstarter and the initial launch, did that affect the development process of the DLC in any way? Did you have more freedom to develop the DLC in a different manner?

Ari: That’s an interesting question. What do you think, William?

William: Our first content pack, Hidden Dreams, came about after we had finished the initial period of patching the game, where we’d fixed all the major bugs and stuff. We’d been talking about some ideas that we had to cut out of the initial game, like a couple of extra bosses that we thought were really interesting. We had an idea for a warp power up that got cut and then we saw from feedback on the initial game that people might have liked the idea of being able to set warp points and move around. So we kind of collated that feedback and said “yeah, let’s make it and give it a proper release” and it was received really well. It was also really fun to create and it made us want to make more.

Ari: Thinking about it, it makes sense for us to bundle a lot of elements [like the warp points]together and put them out all at once rather than trying to trickle out each individual feature, test them bit by bit, wait for the feedback, etc.

William: Yeah. And then we had the idea of doing some kind of Halloween update.

Ari: That idea was quite early in development, I think.

William: Yeah, that was before we decided on Hidden Dreams.

Ari: So that one was always coming.

William: And then, that kind of became the second content pack. We thought three was a good number. I can’t remember when we decided there would be three, but yeah.

The Metroidvania genre has become the go-to genre for indie developers whereas larger development studios, I guess, traditional development studios aren’t necessarily working in that genre anymore. Why do you think it’s a genre that’s thriving in the indie space now?

William: As a genre, it’s super broad. The essence of it is just like going on an adventure and exploring and stuff. So if you make a game kind of based around that, it’s always a really fertile place to start.

Ari: It’s also like a very enjoyable development process because you’re making a world rather than making a set of levels. So everything is like a single, realized place and that’s really appealing.

Obviously, a big reason that indie developers are making 2D Metroidvanias is because the scale of the game is achievable for a small team. And you also get a world that people can retread and a world that can change. As well, potentially, the amount of content they have to make is quite reasonable as well, and the world can expand naturally based on how much budget or time you have. Certainly, that’s the way we worked. So a developer can always tie their Metroidvania off at a small scale and it can still be very successful and very beloved. Or they can just keep making the world, the maze, bigger.

William: Yeah. You can see there’s like a huge difference between the size of these games. You can have like a 2-hour Metroidvania and you can have a 40-hour one, and they are both really good.

Hollow Knight Hidden Dreams (2017)

Do you guys have any updates on the Switch port that you could share?

William: Our thinking on it for now is that we’re going to wait until we’ve got a rock solid idea of when it’s going to come out and then we’ll do an announcement. So we have kept quiet about it for now just because we don’t want to say when we think it’ll come out.

Ari: Yeah, but we also can say that it’s very close and we’re very confident in that version. We think it’s really nice.

William: Yeah, it looks really nice on the Switch and it’s super nice to play.

Yeah, you guys had a little kind of video teaser that went out around one of those Nintendo showcases, and you guys also put out some footage.

Ari: Yeah, Nintendo has been really good at supporting us and supporting the game. So that’s obviously been a really enjoyable process.

William: Yep.

I think a lot of people are really looking forward to it.

William: Yeah. Cool.

So what does it mean to you guys to be ‘indie’?

William: Huh. Uh…

Ari: The main thing is that we’re in control of our destiny and certainly of the games that we make. We’re not a service business. We’re making these worlds, our worlds, and we have the freedom to go whichever direction that we choose to take.

William: Yeah, I mean, the best way to develop is one where you’ve got the shortest time between coming up with an idea and then getting to make it. And that’s what we have as indie developers. We can just be talking about something and then make it that day and put it in the game.

Ari: There’s no gatekeepers in between decisions.

That’s all the time that we have, but before we go, can you give us a tease of your next project? What are you working on next?

Ari: Right now, we’re still supporting Hollow Knight. We have another content pack coming called Gods and Glory. It’s very large, but we’ll be revealing more details about that soon. That’s the final one of these three content packs, and then we have another playable character, Hornet, to come after that.

William: Which is part of the kickstarter. A stretch goal.

Ari: This is all part of the promises. That’s really exciting. We’re not talking too much about that yet, but that is all under wraps. It is all happening still, and we’ll obviously get to that after that last content pack is released.

William: And after that, we’ve got some ideas for stuff we’d like to do next.

Thank you so much.

William: Yeah, cheers!

Ari: Cheers! Thanks so much.