[Blog] Overview of Cancelled Project Yellow Knife

Yellow Knife was one of our very first ideas after Nekojishi. The project started in late 2017 but suspended in mid-2018 since we weren't prepared to handle a game like this at the time.

The concept for the game was inspired by Crusaders Quest by Loadcomplete. It would've been a 2D side-scroller mobile game featuring semi-automatic battles. In the game, you would play a human mage fighting alongside your beast-men colleagues as a part of a a mercenary army in another world. Through the campaign, you would unlock new areas by breaking through the magic barriers that seal the land. The game would also feature a development mode where you can build different facilities for your army and assign your mercenaries to manage them.

Concept of the campaign map, from which the team may travel to other parts of the land through portals.

While being the only human in the army, the protagonist (they player) isn't without company. You would be able to hire beast-man mercenaries to work alongside you. Every time you ran a dungeon you would form a party of mercenaries to tackle whatever danger awaited you. This would serve as the bulk of the gameplay. In battle the player would have direct control of the protagonist, casting spells while the other mercenaries fought automatically. The goal would be to reach the end of the dungeon while keeping your mercenaries alive.

Mercenary concept for Yellow Knife.

Another, more risqué idea we had was similar to many ACG themed mobile games  (A term used in Greater China to describe anime/comic games)  featuring bishojo, such as Kantai Collection or more familiar to many of our fans Kemo Coliseum. The idea is that your mercenary partners would lose their armour as they took damage throughout the battle. As such, the following character concept was designed with multiple outfit layers.

Character concept artwork from Yellow Knife.

Note: "Friendly fire" was going to be an option during battle, so.... you can use your imagination.

By the time we had shelves Yellow Knife, more than 10 characters were designed, many with concept art and a few with them with draft game assets, like the bull posted above. However we decided to put the project aside, rather than release a low-quality game to our fans as we found we weren't ready to tackle a mobile game on the technical side of things. However, this project isn't cancelled for good, so who knows, we might get a chance to make it one day.

Although Yellow Knife was put aside, we still wanted to explore the idea of an isekai story with a human in a world of beast-men. Based on that idea we wrote another story, which came to be project Bear Creek, and release as Beek - Familiar Spirit (i.e. Beek: How I Became a Familiar Spirit and Everything After That) If Yellow Knife ever does surface, we even considered connecting the stories of these two games.

Some of the characters designed for Yellow Knife have since been adapted for project Carmacks, the sequel to Nekojishi currently in development. (http://linandpartnersllp.com a teaser website from last year.) We'll definitely be talking about that one at some point in the future!

If you have any other questions about Project Yellow Knife, or found this interesting, please let us know in the comments!