Hey there, Burrow Barons! How’s your new year been? Ours started much like how it ended… working on Shovel Knight! Let’s talk about it!

Last time we had all sorts of news:

• Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, Switch and PS4 physical editions
• Shovel Knight: King of Cards, Shovel Knight Showdown releasing at once
• Treasure Trove amiibo 3-pack
• All arriving on the very same day: April 9th, 2019!

We don’t mean to break your heart, but let’s break into today’s update:

One Last Delay

We have only a bit more work left to do on completing King of Cards and Showdown. The two, brand new, complete games coming to Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. It remains our focus to bring these to the highest level of quality just as we have with previous Shovel Knight games. It’s also our priority to have these games on the disc/card for the upcoming physical version. We need a little more time to make this happen, and so we are pushing the release back one last time. We’re still aiming to release everything at once, so this this delay applies to everything: physical editions, digital update, and Treasure Trove amiibo 3-pack.

How far back?

We estimate several months– at most! This is not a major delay so much as more space to bring everything together for a polished and complete finale. As always, these last steps require coordination with many teams beyond our own.

We realize the delay is disappointing. To communicate better with everyone moving forward, we will not be announcing a new date until we know one for sure, from all partners involved. All builds shipped out, updates ready to launch, for everybody and everyone. We will announce it for good once it is 100% all across the board!

Are the amiibo delayed too?

Yes. We’re eager for the newest knights join everyone’s collection! However, the update which brings support for these new amiibo are connected to the release of the King of Cards. As described above, we need more time before it is ready for release and so we’ll announce when we know for sure. You can also pre-order to get them right when they’re available from Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop.

There are different dates in different online stores. Are they real?

These dates are placeholders. Stores require and request certain information ahead of time, and we do our best to provide our most accurate guesses at that time! Updating these dates are also not something we can do instantaneously (or seemingly at all sometimes!). We will announce the final release date here on our website once we know for sure. You can also pre-order to get it right when it’s available from Amazon, Best Buy, and Gamestop.

Coming Soon…!

Since this is not a major delay, we’ll soon be providing more updates, big and small for both Showdown and King of Cards. Keep an eye on our Facebook, Twitter, and this very site! Characters, gifs, and trailers (!?!) await!

What’s Going On With Development?

This isn’t new ground given our development style or Shovel Knight’s history. We do our best to set and work toward deadlines, but sometimes additional time is needed. The final phases in particular focus a lot more on playtesting and iteration which is more nebulous to anticipate ahead of time. Except now we’re shoring up multiple games, on more platforms, in more languages, than ever before! Here’s what we’ve been working through:

Two Games

Neither King of Cards or Showdown is sitting idle. We’re making substantial improvements to both with less is in flux each passing day!

King of Cards Levels

They’re not just the meat and potatoes of Shovel Knight, they’re the dessert, and the appetizer! The brain food to start your day and the snack you crave in the afternoon! King Knight features courses, which are shorter than previous Shovel Knight levels, but much more numerous (more than 30!). We’ve put a huge focus on polishing each course and we hope you enjoy exploring them!

Showdown

Multiple players battling it out, as all their favorite characters, on so many stages, with countless combinations and surprises in the mix! Once characters, stages, and modes landed in a good place we really had our work cut out for the next step of fully realizing it all. Not just this many stages and that many characters, but AI playing on all these stages as (and against) all these characters, in all of these configurations, and featured in their own Story Mode! We approached all this wacky fun very seriously– and now it is nearly complete!

Platform Tuning

Showdown brings new challenges with multiple players and controllers, AI, larger stages, and more. King of Cards itself is our largest update, and we need to take extra care make it a perfect fit on platforms like the 3DS (at one point, we thought King Knight was so big it might not fit on 3DS!). We’re happy to say this hurdle is cleared! It’s humming along in both performance and memory. We really hope you have a chance to play King Knight’s adventure on 3DS!

Localization

There’s a whole lotta text in this little 8-bit inspired game, now in 9 languages! As always, our localization partners at Words of Magic and 8-4 have been amazing throughout it all! From the most critical puns down to the most trivial plot points. However, this step naturally falls to the final steps of the project, and SK’s extra limited resolution can make for extra challenge. Most all of this text is ready and and accounted for, we’re just running more tests. Speaking of…

Testing

So much testing! These new games are coming to a multitude of platforms. Which means testing King of Cards, our biggest adventure yet, 100%, on [Switch, Wii U, 3DS, PS4, PS3, Vita, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, and Linux]! Oh and Showdown, on [Switch, Wii U, PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, and Linux]. But wait, these updates are coming to already released versions of Shovel Knight! Along with bug fixes and new content (like amiibo!). This means testing Shovel of Hope on [Switch, Wii U, 3DS, PS4, PS3, Vita, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, and Linux]. Plague of Shadows on [Switch, Wii U, 3DS, PS4, PS3, Vita, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, and Linux]. Specter of Torment on [Switch, Wii U, 3DS, PS4, PS3, Vita, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, and Linux]. We’ve worked hard over the years to automate and make this process more manageable wherever we can but, at the end of the day, we need to boot up and play all these configurations. Steel thy thumbs!

 

These aren’t excuses! We just wanted to provide more context for what we’ve been tackling here. We plan to adopt this “no date until we have a date” style in the future too. Thanks for sticking with us while we figure it all out!