I Hacked Hollow Knight To Uncover Its Best-Kept Secrets

Hollow Knight is among the most famous Unity games of all time. Conveniently, I've been breaking apart Unity games to reveal their secrets. Hollow Knight seemed like the perfect choice to look in to next. Here's what I found!

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:01 Symphony of the Hollow Knight
02:18 Out-of-bounds
06:00 Other Secrets
07:58 Code Review
12:59 Modifying the Game
14:24 Wrapping Up

[redtomato]

9:12 I’m kinda a lore guy so I’ll do my best to explain some of the more obscure areas
Abyss_Deep refers to the one time section in the Abyss that is unlocked with Kingsoul
Acid_Lake could refer to the teachers archives, or more likely the lake of unn
Bone_Forest is actually a scrapped area that would’ve included terrain made of bones and lava lakes. It ended up getting replaced with the ancient basin and is being repurposed in Silksong
Godseeker_Waste is a secret area in the Gods and Glory dlc
Gods_Glory could be the entirety of godhome or could be the arenas that you fight in
Joni_Grave is the area where you get the worst charm in the game
Mage_Tower might be the soul sanctum area where you get Shade Soul
Mines is probably the area in crossroads with myla and the entrance to crystal peak
I’m not sure what None is
Outskirts could be kingdoms edge as I don’t see it on the list
Royal_Gardens and Soul_Society I think were the original names for Queens Gardens and Soul Sanctum
Royal_Quarter could be where you find the White Lady
Town is dirtmouth
And finally Wyrmskin is the once-off area where you fight Hornet 2 and collect the Kings Brand

[st.altair]

Pixel art Hollow Knight is fun to think about while I wait for Silksong.

Cool Junji Ito shirt btw

[wanopano]

If you ever hack subnautica please change the reaper’s model to just a gargantuan peeper 🙏🙏

[smellthel]

I had no idea this game was made in the 3d engine. This game is so beautiful.

[smellthel]

That was an amazing video. I learned so much and plan on using some of these tricks in my future projects! 10/10!

[etistyle]

the Update10 function looks a lot like "fix update" in unity. I don't know if it's the same but, fix update is used for physics calculation mostly, it helped prevent that great speed object collision are still check even tho the speed is really high. The update x scale, is probably for the "facing direction" of the sprite (since it's a 2D game). Negative XScale Value just, flip the sprite. and the Z scale might be to prevent bug, like maybe collision that could put the knight out of position on the Z axis. this is what comes to me intuitivly, but i'm not sure about all of it.
The idea of reseting the ZAxis from a small amount to prevent z rendering fight, is probably also for avoiding multiple ennemy to "stack, under the same position".

[trgs]

The "censored" versions of games for China are usually done by the publishers so that they are able to get through revision faster. For instance the removal for skeletons in WoW was done before it was even seen by the government.

[bigmclargehuge]

Man, I've tried to get into hollow knight too many times. I've never been able to get too far, it just didn't click with me. It's gorgeous though, interested to see what cool stuff you find!

[thstudio]

Jack is insane for this work in hollow knight. Do you happen to know of any Unity specifics of some of the choices they made, like settings for audio sources? even if its the z position info it would be massively helpful since I think they actually used the 3D spatial blend for audio with their own custom settings to accommodate sound for a 2D game. There is some spatialization (audio having volume change based on distance) but Unity's audio source's in 2D do not support that, and if you don't set it to 1 on the settings you will hear audio globally from any position in the scene unless there is custom code managing it based on the distance from the camera.

[RwnEsper]

Only a few minutes into the video, just wanted to say how much I appreciate that you specify that Hollow Knight is not pixel art. Yes it is nitpicky, but pixel art is very distinct from hand-drawn (both can yield stunning results mind you).

[tayfaith]

Ceiling stag and wide stag got me good :D

[AlirezaR]

Pretty cool ! You deserve much more subscribers

[iceflame]

Well. That was ludicrously impressive from the pov of a layman.

[cerulean]

The only difference between the Chinese and "normal" version of Hollowknight I can imagine, would be that the text speed is significantly faster when playing in Chinese, so much faster every speedrunner worth their salt plays in Chinese. No idea if that's just a byproduct of how Chinese as a written language works, or if it's somehow part of the chinese version of the game.

[da_SpiffR]

Yes! It was worth it. Great video, thank you!

[coreplays]

Bruh I love hollow knight like this is in my top 10

[shadowofcat]

you should really mess around with ori and the will of the wisps in the earlier patches there is so much cut content it could almost make up a whole game

[da_SpiffR]

Would you consider doing a video on Terraria? The behind the scenes of its' code and stuff like that.

[charlessmith]

8:04 searching the web a bit there's a 2017 thread in the Steam forums where someone was complaining about the quality of the Chinese translation. A dev chimed in later on and said due to feedback they wouldn't release it, and that it was a beta (at the time). Not sure whether that has changed in the mean time, but that could be a remnant from earlier test builds. I also wonder if some of their technical choices (such as the off-screen ui area) were based on constraints of any of the console ports. 🤔

[jacob-the-awsome-autist]

do you ever think about opening up a discord because your content seems prime for one given the intricate nature of your videos