Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Fall Guys Ultimate Knockout is a Platformer Battle Royale game developed by Mediatonic and published by Devolver Digital. When playing, your goal is to be the last player standing. There are Race, Survival, Hunt, Logic, Team, and Final Rounds. It is the first game to be adapted by GameToons.

History
The conception of what became Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout began when Mediatonic was discussing another project in January 2018. One member, lead designer Joe Walsh, made a throwaway comment that it reminded him of game shows such as Takeshi's Castle and Total Wipeout. He drew from that inspiration to create a pitch document for what would become Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. Originally titled Fools' Gauntlet, Walsh's pitch featured 100 players competing in a battle royale composed of physical challenges. Creative director Jeff Tanton, while initially skeptical that creating another battle royale game would be successful, was quickly convinced of the game's potential, and forwarded Walsh's pitch to Mediatonic's founders.

Tanton and Walsh worked on a pitch deck, and principal concept artist Dan Hoang created images featuring colourful, bean-shaped characters racing on an obstacle course in the sky. Tanton explained that Hoang's character designs helped shift the focus of the game away from the obstacle course itself, to the characters. With the pitch deck completed, Tanton pitched the game to 10 different publishers at the 2018 Game Developers Conference. Six months after Devolver Digital agreed to publish the game, development began.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout began its initial prototyping process with a small team, growing to 30 people during development.Initial progress on individual minigames was slow which caused the team to worry that there wouldn't be enough content for launch. A turning point came when the team made a group of pillars that "Took the opinions of people out of the occasion" and allowed the developers to "kill ideas faster". Such pillars include ensuring a minigame was "50-50 chaos and skill" and that a level had to be "different every time". Inspired by game shows, and differentiating from first-person shooter battle royale games, Mediatonic focused on gameplay variety. By presenting the player with several, randomized rounds of game modes, Mediatonic hoped to recreate the experience of being on a game show. To help keep the "spirit of playground games and game shows", Mediatonic created an internal rule that game modes needed to be explained in three words. Over time, the game underwent numerous other changes. The player count was decreased from 100 to 60, because overpopulated games "stopped being readable or fun". In testing, Mediatonic noted that players overestimated the number of players, stating "we didn't need as many players as we thought to create the crowds we wanted the gameplay to include."

It's a Knockout, a game show forcing contestants to dress up in oversized costumes, inspired the idea that the characters should "have that element of being completely uniquely, badly designed for the task that we were gonna put them through". The ragdoll physics are deliberate, to avoid "hyper athletic Ninja Warrior characters" and because "falling over is funny". According to Walsh, striking the right balance between funny ragdoll collisions and game performance was critical, because "as soon as you lose the ragdoll-ness of the character, you lose the comedy". The character designs were inspired by the look of vinyl toys.

Mediatonic began working on Season 2 before the game's release with level designer Joseph Juson, noting that it was more of an "expansion" compared to season 3 where the team tried to bring new ideas.

Released for Microsoft Windows and Playstation 4 on August 4th, 2020. It's also released on the switch in Summer 2021, it has also been released on Android and IOS, but only in China.