Long time readers of Kickstart This! may recall Knite and the Ghost Lights by Mobot Studios. The gorgeous side-scroller was one of the first games we featured in this column and one of the first Kickstarter projects that I backed personally.
Even now, I have fond memories of discovering the game on the crowdfunding site way back in October of 2013. It was pitched as a stop-motion RPG built with a strong sense of early Tim Burton. Knite and the Ghost Lights was going to be delivered by July 2014 on the PC and Wii U (Nintendo’s previous console is another thing I have fond memories of).
However, the delivery deadline was missed, and that’s when things started to go wrong for the game, which has been limping along and languishing in development hell ever since. At the time, Lex Plotnikoff, the lead artist and creative force on Knite and the Ghost Lights, found himself unable to return to America. The Russian national was mired in red tape, which threw a proverbial spanner into the works, and brought development on the game grinding to a halt.
From there it became confusing as to who was working on what. The updates on Kickstarter continued to come from different people.
In August 2015, Lex announced that Mobot Studios was no longer working on the project, and that he had formed a new group called Team Mistland to continue development. Lex was working with Tisha Razumovsky (Set Designer / Photographer) and someone named Eugene, though it was never explained who he was or what his role on the game was. The links to their website are now defunct, so we may never know.
We received a few updates over the next few months, including a new trailer and some artwork. But then we received another important update. Mobot Studios founder James Fletcher had returned to the project with a view of getting the game back on track. In December 2015, he posted an update explaining that he had had to leave the project temporarily to take on commercial work to support himself and his family. However, he was back on Knite, all the art was finished, and he had secured a publishing deal.
This positivity spilled over into 2016. In April, there was an update about the stop motion controls and other projects that the developer was working on. It all seemed positive, until August. An update was posted (presumably by James, but it is not signed) that details the financial difficulties for Mobot Studios and other problems they were facing as an indie game developer. At this point, Knight and the Ghost Lights had been in development for over three years.
The same message was echoed again in January 2017, when Mobot Studios was described financially as a “sinking ship.” However bleak the painted image was, it always ended with a glimpse of hope, that somehow the backers who had funded the game would not be left high and dry. On the back of this last update, I tried to get an interview with James Fletcher. It almost went ahead, but then he declined. The reasons were vague, but re-reading our email exchange, it appeared that he was being evasive because he knew what was coming.
In February 2017, Mobot Studios closed.
By this point, I had been burned by several Kickstarter projects. This was becoming a familiar story, and while I often felt angry or conned at these cancellations, here I had nothing but sympathy for the developers. As a fellow creative, I understood what it was to hammer away at a project so big that it consumed all of your energy as you devoted your soul to it.
Yet the closure of Mobot almost seemed like a blessing. James had learned valuable lessons about trying to run a business and came up with a new plan. Since so much work had been done on the project by this point, four years after the initial Kickstarter campaign, the new plan was to make a smaller game based on the early work of Lex and Tisha. There was talk of a platformer that would be more focused on gameplay and less on the sweeping story of Knite and the world crafted around him.. As the updated succinctly put it, “a little less Zelda and a little more Mario.” Mobile gaming was all the rage so that was the target audience in the hopes of making enough money to expand the episodes.
Or so it seemed. The next update, issued six weeks later, was forced to clarify the mobile position due to a high demand for refunds. People were angry. They had not funded a mobile game. They wanted a console game. This was not the first project I had backed where the focus had shifted, or the game had undergone a significant change from what was promised, but that is part and parcel in crowdfunding. The reasoning was sound… a mobile game was easier and cheaper to launch than a Nintendo game (keep in mind that this is immediately before the Nintendo Switch was released so the Wii U was no longer a viable option).
What did irk me slightly was a reversal on the refund policy. In March 2017, James had welcomed those looking for refunds and would try and satisfy them. “However, I plan to set all the money from Knite aside and take refunds from anyone that isn’t happy on a first come first served basis.”
Six weeks later, this tone had changed somewhat. “There is no refund plan at this point. First, there isn’t any money to refund. Second, the project is not even cancelled.”
After this, there were three updates spread out over three years. The first of these arrived in July 2017. It was vague update about James building a new home studio and teasing the game on PlayStation 4, perhaps to appease those who had read “mobile” and thought of something cheap and slapdash.
The second pinged into my inbox in May 2018. It was less of an update about the game and more of James’s career. He was working at Crescent Moon Games. No work had been done on Knite in over a year. One quote caught my eye as he explained why he could not afford to complete the game: “When we started, Kickstarter still felt more about funding a dream. They even put a warning to crowdfunders that not all projects come to fruition.”
And that is why I thought I would document this experience. This is a cautionary tale where there are no winners, only losers. My money has been spent somewhere, but like all investments, your capital is at risk. Yet I do not feel like I was conned. I never received the game I funded, the game James and Lex and Tisha envisioned, but they never got to see their creation come to life, not in any meaningful way at least. Which makes this next part all the more sad.
The last update, the one that cast Knite and his Ghost Lights back into my mind and spurned me to write this article, arrived earlier this month. Here it is in its entirety:
I know a lot of you have probably forgotten about this project. This update may come as a surprise to many of you.
I have some very bad news. I’m not sure how else to say this so, I’ll just lay it out and keep it short. Lex suffered a stroke. It was bad. He also had to manage his recovery (still in Russia) on his own with no healthcare. I’m sure you can only imagine how difficult that would be. He was left severely paralyzed. It’s been a rough road to say the least but, he has managed to find some peace in writing.
Even though he only has some movement in one hand he has managed to write a novel about Knite. It’s pretty solid and about 70k words and he wants you all to have it. We’re sorting out how we are going to deal with things but, I’ll be getting more details out in the coming weeks.
Please keep Lex in your thoughts. He is truly one of the most talented people I’ve ever met.
What makes it sadder still is that, whoever has penned this, whether it was James or Tisha, it appears on Kickstarter as written by Mobot Studios, because they are still listed as the creator.
The Knite community, or what is left of it, has been universal in offering their thoughts and prayers to Lex. The fact that he has overcome this to write an entire novel is a testament to his vision for what this game could have been. I’m excited to read it and finally explore the Mistlands, even if I have to use my own imagination to get there.
