An animator and a web designer in Adelaide.

Team Cherry is an independent video game studio in Adelaide, South Australia, and it began as a side project between two people with day jobs outside games. Wikipedia describes the co-founders as the artist and animator Ari Gibson and the web designer William Pellen, and says the two set up Team Cherry together in 2014. Before that, according to Wikipedia, Gibson worked at the Adelaide animation studio The People’s Republic of Animation from 2005 to 2010 and then co-ran a small animation studio, Mechanical Apple, from 2010 to 2014, while Pellen worked as a web designer and made small games as a hobby.

The two men told the trade magazine MCV/DEVELOP, in a feature published on 31 July 2018, how the partnership started. Gibson said they had known each other for a while; he was working in animation, and Pellen, who was doing web development and making games in his spare time, sent him a demo, which Pellen described as a simple platformer in the manner of Mario. Gibson said he played it and contacted Pellen about entering a game jam together, just for fun, and that it went well enough that they did several more.

The first of those jams set the template. The Melbourne screen museum ACMI, in a feature by curator Jini Maxwell published in September 2025, reports that for Ludum Dare 27 in 2013, Pellen, Gibson and Rohan Fraser made Hungry Knight, a simple Flash game built in the Stencyl tool, in which a horned, cloaked knight kills enemies to eat the berries on their backs. Pellen told MCV/DEVELOP that Hungry Knight features the same character as Hollow Knight, and Gibson added that it used the same sprites. A later three-day jam, on the theme “Beneath the surface”, produced what Gibson called the very beginning of Hollow Knight. Pellen said the pair kept working on that simple insect world until they decided it could be published as a professional product, and set up a Kickstarter at the end of 2014. “And that’s how Team Cherry came about, in Adelaide, Australia,” the magazine wrote.

A crowdfunding launch, a self-published debut and a long sequel.

The studio announced itself and its game on the same day. ACMI reports that on 19 November 2014, Pellen, Gibson and the programmer David Kazi announced Team Cherry and Hollow Knight for the first time through the Kickstarter campaign. It says the project was approved for Steam Greenlight, the community vote then used to admit games to the Steam store, on 21 November, was chosen as a Kickstarter staff pick two days later, and was announcing stretch goals by 10 December. One of those goals promised a second playable character, Hornet, to be delivered after release.

The team that made the game stayed close-knit. Pellen told MCV/DEVELOP in 2018 that the core of the project was himself, Gibson and Kazi, as technical director, developing the game, with Christopher Larkin on sound and music, and that friends were brought in for some voices, including Pellen’s mother. Wikipedia says Hollow Knight was developed and published by Team Cherry itself, released for Windows on 24 February 2017, with Linux and macOS versions following that April and a Nintendo Switch version on 12 June 2018.

The Hornet idea outgrew its plan. ACMI reports that it was first meant as downloadable content in which players could switch to Hornet, but that because no Hallownest-style area naturally suited her height and movement, Team Cherry chose to make a standalone game with a new world. Wikipedia says the studio announced in February 2019 that the project would become a full sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Shacknews reported on 21 August 2025 that Team Cherry had revealed the release date during a special announcement at Gamescom 2025, more than six years after the game was first shown, and that the sequel would arrive on 4 September. Wikipedia records the release on 4 September 2025, again published by Team Cherry. ACMI noted that when it interviewed the co-directors in May 2025, they spoke from the same Adelaide studio in which they had made Hollow Knight.

A knight drawn to be drawn a thousand times.

A game studio’s identity usually reaches players before the game does. The company logo appears in a short boot screen or animated ident in the seconds while software loads, then again on boxes, store pages, trailers and the credits. Because those seconds repeat every time someone starts a game, the ident tends to be brief, legible on a phone or a television, and quiet enough that it does not compete with the title that follows. Publishers add a second layer: one publishing name may sit in front of games from several development studios, each with its own look, so the publisher’s mark has to work beside very different artwork.

Much of the visible branding, though, belongs to the games rather than the company. Characters, mascots and title logos carry the recognition, and the studio name may appear underneath them in small type. Some companies let a recurring character stand in for the studio; others are known chiefly through a consistent visual style shared across their games. Ownership changes leave marks too: when a studio or its parent is bought, the new owner’s branding may appear beside the studio’s own, and when a studio becomes independent, the parent’s mark drops away. For designers, the practical point is that a studio identity is a set of placements — a boot screen, a store icon, a credit line, a website — and each needs a version of the mark that works at its size and in its moment.

A character built for simplicity, and a world written as fiction.

The Knight, the protagonist of Hollow Knight, is older than the studio’s name. Gibson told MCV/DEVELOP in 2018 that he sketched the Knight for the very first game jam, and that the design was probably built from the simplest way of representing something bug-like that behaves like a knight, shaped by technical limits. Putting a little cloak on a character helps, he said, because you cannot see its arms, and a protagonist should be graphic and basic because you end up drawing it a thousand times over. ACMI observes that the knight in Hungry Knight is almost identical to Hollow Knight’s protagonist, right down to the nail strapped to its back.

The look of the games comes from the same hand. Wikipedia says Gibson’s hand-drawn sketches were scanned directly into the game engine, and Gibson told MCV/DEVELOP that the team chose hand-drawn 2D partly for simplicity, since both co-directors were comfortable working with drawings and timing 2D characters. The studio’s voice was set early too: ACMI describes the Kickstarter updates as reading like bestiary entries, introducing creatures and places in the language of the game’s fiction, and quotes the original Hungry Knight description, which ends with the line “It’s hard, but you can do it! Be brave.”

For a design guide, Team Cherry shows how a studio identity can be carried by one simple, repeatable character and by writing that stays inside its fictional world, rather than by an elaborate logo system. Compare Devolver Digital, an independent publisher whose guide covers its Fork Parker mascot and fake press conferences, and Playdead, another independent studio whose guide sits in this same group of game developers. For this guide we use cavern slate, cherry red and shell white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Team Cherry’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.