Presskit

  • Developer: Kamil Kozłowski, based in Poland
  • Release date: TBA
  • Platforms: iOS and Android, later Windows and macOS
  • a paid app

Description

The Lone Sword is fantasy-themed action adventure 2D platformer with unique movement and combat, coming first to iOS and Android.

You are a sword who suddenly came to life inside a dilapidated castle full of rogue automatons, paranoid defense mechanisms, and other living objects. You have to find the crazy creator of all this, to ask one fundamental question – why do you even exist?

Slash through space and enemies with absolutely no limits. Your entire body deals damage – and your entire body can receive damage. Lava? Razorblades? Snipers? Plywood? Utilize the great controls created from scratch for touchscreens and dance around adversities to reach your goal.

History

The Lone Sword is created by Kamil Kozłowski, a solo developer from Poland. He’s been working professionally in gamedev since 2015. The idea of a game where you control a weapon itself – without any hero – followed him for years, but it was so strange and elusive it was hard to begin development.

A perfect solution hit him after he took hold of an iPad device, when he decided to make an entire platforming/exploration game that doesn’t require on-screen arrows or other compromises – just simple swipes. This is where controlling just a weapon finally found home and form.

And so in 2019 started a pretty experimental project in which most of the design problems didn’t have any pre-existing solutions, and which really took advantage of Unity’s rapid prototyping workflow. How do you structure platforming for a character that treats gravity as mere suggestion? How much precision can you expect from a player in such setup? And how do you fight or defend yourself when you’re a uniform chunk of metal? This way The Lone Sword became a game as surprising during design as it is during gameplay.

Being just a developer, Kamil teached himself digital art pretty much from scratch to provide proper visuals. Almost all of the graphics in the game are made using iPad’s Procreate app; with additional tileset work done in open source app Krita.

Features

  • Unique movement and intuitive touchscreen controls
  • Diverse stages, from obstacle courses to small-scale metroidvanias
  • Combat that allows you to dodge individual projectiles and other dangers in the air; and target specific parts of your enemies
  • Large amount of world mechanics introduced level after level, for fresh puzzles and more challenging combat

Screenshots

Credits

Kamil Kozłowski
design, programming, graphics

Contact

©2023 Kamil Kozłowski. All rights reserved.