Wonderful, patient Shovelers and Shovelettes. Your long wait is about to be over. Hopefully you saw our release trailer (Click here if you haven’t!), but that’s just the beginning of the festivities. We’re going to be doing streams and having a fancy fun party time: Here’s the plan! IT’S SHOVELING TIME!
Have you noticed dogs barking at weird times lately? The glimmer of the moon also looked a little different. Babies are being born early in hospitals across the country… something is going on this week.
June 26th. Shovel Knight is out.
Shovel Knight is a game being initially released on 3 platforms: Nintendo Wii U, 3DS, and PC (Steam, Humble Store). Creating a new version of Shovel Knight isn’t as easy as pressing a button; taking on a new platform is no simple feat! Each new device brings new specs, controls, quirks, expectations, and features which need to be considered across the game. We don’t just want our game to run on the system, we want it to feel at home there too! So…when it came time to develop Shovel Knight on Wii U, we were already brainstorming about the wild world of Miiverse!
If you’re part of the press, this might be a super exciting post for you….otherwise, it’s probably only a really exciting post for you! Today we’re making a press kit available for everyone to view, download, and enjoy. There’s lots of new screens and art on the page, so be sure to check it out and make crazy fun collages out of the art! We’re going to be continuously updating the kit with new trailers, images, music, info, and more as we make and collect them; so keep your eyes peeled to the page for updates.
Without further ado, check out the kit:
Many fans of Yacht Club Games have noticed a weird trend in the games we’ve worked on: we almost always add an action, assigned to a specific button, that has little or no purpose for either the gameplay or the story. Initially, this may seem to fly in the face of our design sensibilities which favor simple gameplay and mechanics. Why would anyone design a mechanic that doesn’t benefit gameplay and instead adds another potentially confusing action. “Games should be simple! One action! Like jumping in Mario! Why would anyone decide to do something so dumb?!” Today we’re going to try and explain why we add useless actions to games, and explain some of the weird and fun things we’ve done in the past. This quirk might not fit every game, but it’s definitely a unique re-occurring element to us that adds a little bit of flavor!
In case you missed it, this is a reposting of an article we wrote for Gamasutra. Check out the original here!
Shovel Knight is a game that embraces the look of NES classics, but has some major differences when examined closely. When setting out to develop the game’s aesthetic and play style, we at Yacht Club Games had a few goals in mind. Instead of emulating the NES exactly, we would create a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game.
Checkpoints are a contentious subject when it comes to gameplay design. Especially in a retro style games, there are many schools of thought. First off, let’s define a checkpoint: for our purposes, it’s any mechanic that saves the player’s progress, allowing them to return to it in that position after dying or losing.
Some people think that repeating content is never good and copious checkpoints or even quicksaving should be implemented; think the quicksave ability in a game like Half Life, where you can save the game at any time. Other players are purists, and think progress shouldn’t be saved until you beat a stage! The Yacht Club thinks there is no hard and fast rule: it depends on the game you are trying to create, the emotions you’re trying to evoke, and the experience you want your players to have.
For Shovel Knight, we knew from the beginning that losing, lives, and checkpoints would be important to get right. Lack of checkpoints and hard limits can typically cause a lot of frustration in classic games. We wanted to retain the mechanic, but do away with the inherent frustration of having to repeat large swaths of content.
Iterating on checkpoint design was a slow and painful progression, but the result was worth it. There were 3 main versions of the checkpoint mechanic, so let’s go through them!
If you can’t tell by now, we’re obsessed with controllers. If you were one of the lucky ones to check out our instruction manual for Shovel Knight, you may have noticed we included a link for a page we said would go into more detail about controller, recommendations, and more. And we finally filled out that page! Check it out and give us all your feedback. We are controller snobs and love to talk about them as much as possible!
Keep letting us know if you have stuff you guys want us to talk about on the blog. Until then, we’re going to keep posting about what makes us excited!
PS. If you’re still having trouble getting your controller to work, or you haven’t setup your controller in time, there is the option of setting it up through Big Picture Mode in Steam. Open Steam, go into Big Picture Mode, open Settings, configure your controller bindings, and then boot Shovel Knight!
Yesterday, we dove into how StreetPass works in Shovel Knight, so if you missed that, be sure to give it a look. Today, we’re going to talk a little about how the idea developed; you might not believe where its origins lie!
