The King's Bird - an accessible precision platformer

Trying to make a precision platformer accessible to a broad audience is something of an "impossible mission", but that's exactly what Serenity Forge are trying with The King's Bird

"This is a physics-driven momentum platformer", says Zhang. "Where you use this gliding power that kind of makes it so that you do a lot of wingsuit-like active gliding. And we combine that with the traditional sense of precision platforming."

"We wanted to make this as accessible a precision platformer as possible for those who might be intimidated by precision platformers and kind of almost trick them into trying this out with the attraction of the beautiful art, the beautiful music, and the narrative premise."

While The King's Bird is a difficult game and one that has been designed with speedruns in mind, Serenity Forge have designed the game in a way to avoid frustrating the player.

"When you die you immediately respawn, there's no limited lives. We just wanted to get you back immediately into the game. And then the music keeps on playing as well. One of the things that we wanted to implement for the music was actually dynamic music. So when she's using her cloak powers she is actually singing a counter melody of the background music. When she's on the ground she's not singing. So that's another way for us to encourage to use that gliding mechanic as much as possible and to also indicate through the audio and the visuals that she's very happy when she's using the cloak powers."

The King's Bird will be released on PC and "some consoles" (not specified at this point) by the end of the year.