Magic Knight 5

After almost 40 years it’s time for Magic Knight to come out of retirement and appear in a brand new game!

On this page

The new Game

MK5 is just a working title. There’s a competition to suggest game names.

The game system will be familiar to those of you who played the 8-bit games, but there are some obvious improvements.

  • Drastically improved graphics as this game is written for PCs with much higher resolution and many more colours
  • The rooms scroll sideways rather than flip to the next screen because PCs are 1,000s of times faster than the old 8-bit machines
  • The other characters animate rather than just appearing in different places when changing rooms
  • There are three play layers (ie MK can walk into and out of the screen)
  • Doors on the front and back layers lead to other scrolling rooms
  • There will be mouse and game controller support in addition to keyboard
  • Music and sound effects are there by default
  • No sudden deaths (unless you play in Hardcore Retro mode)

Here are a few screenshots showing where things are at the moment. Please bear in mind these are early test/development screens.

In this next one MK is asking Gimbal the Wizard for the Money Machine (the command line at the top of the screen is a work in progress)

There’s a LOT of work to do, but I’m working quite hard at it. The game should be out some time in 2025 and will probably be on Steam. If I get a good response I intend making a trilogy of it with the next episode set in the future. The hardest part is building the interface for the puzzles and story and (apart from penciled in interface upgrades) that’ll all be done before I get to MK6.

If you sign up to my substack feed at https://davidxjones.substack.com/ or enter the name the game competition at https://davidxjonesauthor.com/name-the-game-competition/ without saying NO SUBSTACK in the body of your text you’ll get updates on the project.

You can also get updates if you follow me on
Bluesky – @davidxjonesauthor.bsky.social
Twitter – @davidxjauthor
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/MagicKnightGames/
or https://www.facebook.com/davidxjonesauthor/ for more book related stuff