Fall Guys - Development and release

The conception of 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. From there, he went on 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 then began working on a pitch deck for the game. For the pitch deck, principal concept artist Dan Hoang created images featuring colorful, 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.After Devolver Digital agreed to publish the game, development began six months later 2Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout began its initial prototyping process with a small team, growing to 30 people during development. In an attempt to remain faithful to the game shows they were inspired by, as well as differentiate themselves from first-person-shooter battle royale games, Mediatonic's focus was 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, as the games "stopped being readable or fun" when there were too many players competing. The game also went through name changes, going from Fools' Gauntlet to Stumble Chums to Fall Guys. 3It's a Knockout, a game show that forced its 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 were implemented on purpose, because Mediatonic did not want them to be like "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. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout was announced at E3 in June 2019 and was released on 4 August 2020 for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4. Prior to release, it was announced that Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout would be free for PlayStation Plus members during the rest of August. On 12 August 2020, Mediatonic had announced their first major update would be arriving on the next day, as well as announcing that they promise additional content would be added in the future. On 17 August 2020, the developers announced that they would be making custom skin for a brand for whoever donated the most money to the charity SpecialEffect.