When we started making Knockout Royale, the idea sounded pretty simple: hit other players with a stick, knock them off the arena, earn cash from eliminations, and buy better sticks.
The actual development was not simple at all.
Most of our problems came from the combat system, especially the physics and knockback. Since the entire game depends on hitting other players, even a small issue could make a match feel terrible.
At one point, the combat was completely broken. You could swing at someone, clearly hit them, and then have to wait before anything happened. The knockback would come late, so attacks felt unresponsive and confusing. Sometimes it looked like your swing had missed, only for the other player to suddenly move a moment later.
It was annoying to play and even more annoying to fix.
We tried changing the attack timing, hit detection, animations, and the way the server handled each hit. Every adjustment meant starting another test, hitting each other repeatedly, and checking whether the delay was actually gone or just less obvious.
Then we had another version where hits registered immediately, but the knockback was completely out of control.
Instead of being pushed away from the attacker, players would sometimes fly straight into the air and spin uncontrollably. It looked funny the first few times. After that, it became another major problem because there was no way to tell where someone would land—or whether they would land at all.
The game briefly felt less like a competitive arena and more like a broken physics experiment.
Fixing it was difficult because knockback depends on several things at once. The direction of the hit matters. The target’s movement matters. Jumping, falling, attacking, standing near a wall, and getting hit by multiple players can all change the result.
A system might work correctly when we tested it with two players standing still. As soon as we tried it during a real fight, someone would get launched upward, spin across the map, or react differently from everyone else.
There was also a constant balance problem. Stronger knockback made hits feel more satisfying, but it also made the physics less stable. Lower knockback was easier to control, but the sticks started feeling weak.
We spent a lot of development going back and forth between those two problems.
The basic process became:
Find a glitch. Try to reproduce it. Change something. Test it again. Find a different glitch.
There were times when we wanted to stop working on the physics and move on to more interesting features. The problem was that there was no point adding extra content while the main mechanic still felt unreliable.
In Knockout Royale, players need to believe that their wins and losses are fair. Getting launched off the map because another player timed a good hit is part of the game. Getting launched into the sky while spinning for no clear reason is not.
Working on the combat also showed us why multiplayer testing matters so much. A controlled test cannot recreate what happens when several players are jumping, swinging, moving around the edges, and attacking each other at the same time.
Real matches caused problems we had never seen while testing alone.
Knockout Royale is not a huge game, but that does not mean it was easy to build. When a game is focused on one main mechanic, that mechanic has nowhere to hide. The combat has to feel right because players will notice immediately when it does not.
With the August 3 release getting closer, we are focused on testing rather than adding random last-minute features. We are checking the combat, looking for physics glitches, and trying to put the game into the most chaotic situations possible before players do it for us.
We know players will probably still find something we missed. That is normal for a multiplayer game. Our job is to keep fixing issues and improving the game after release.
Knockout Royale has involved a lot more trial and error than we originally expected. Still, after seeing players fly into the sky, spin uncontrollably, and react several seconds after being hit, normal knockback now feels like a major achievement.