Nintendo was gracious enough to give us an opportunity to demo the 3DS version of Shovel Knight live today as part of their Nintendo Treehouse Live at E3 event.  Lots of cool games are being shown off all the time, so be sure to check it out on their channel!

We presented a demo showing off the previously unseen, lava ridden domain of Mole Knight – the  Lost City! It was really exciting for us to be able to show the game off on such a big stage, and I hope everyone enjoyed it, but if you guys missed it, the guys at Nintendo Everything were kind enough to post a recap of the footage on their YouTube channel.  It’s a little low quality so we’ll try to get an HD version for you soon, but in the meantime, be sure to check it out:

When building a game for a new platform, we like to accent the features of the platform that make it unique. The 3DS has a lot to offer — stereoscopic gameplay, Play Coins, and the dual screen/touch screen — but we were really excited to highlight StreetPass. StreetPass is a feature of the 3DS that allows multiple 3DSs to exchange data when the systems are in range of each other and powered on (including in sleep mode).  So for example, you collect a hat in one game, and then when you pass your friend on the street, your game could send that hat to your friend, all without either of you doing anything!  It’s a very cool feature that you can’t find on other systems, and we found it to be criminally underused.  There have been interesting uses of it, but it seems like most games either 1) don’t bother with it or 2) implement it more as a token system that unlocks gameplay. In other words, if you see more people in the real world, you’ll unlock more of the game or be allowed to continue playing the game – that kind of thing.

June 26th!!! Mark your calendars! Tell your friends! We have official word from Nintendo and Steam that Shovel Knight will be released and playable on the 26th of this month! Get ready for the greatest 8-Bit inspired adventure game to sweep you off your feet and deliver pure fun directly into your soul. We’ve worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for more than a year to bring this game to you; we’re extremely proud of the result, and we hope you love it just as much as we do. We hit some snags along the way and we’re sorry that we couldn’t deliver it sooner, but, hopefully, it will prove more than worth the wait! For all of you backers who have been following the adventure since the beginning, we have a few more surprises today too!

FOR SHOVELRY! After near endless days of bleary-eyed internal testing and bug fixing, we opened this week by creating a gold master candidate of Shovel Knight! That means we have a potentially finished version of the game which is ready to go live!       Now we are in the submission and certification process for platform holders. That’s when external teams verify that the game works as expected. If everything checks out on their side, then they’ll prepare the game to go live on their digital storefront and get back to us with a true, solid release date.

But! If they uncover any issues that somehow slipped by our team then the game will “bounce” back to us for a fix! So… at this point, even the Yacht Club is playing the waiting game.

After designing, implementing, iterating, and bug fixing for over a year, the team here is really stoked about where the final version of the game landed. We think it’s our best work yet, and we hope you will enjoy playing Shovel Knight!  Here’s a screen shot of the final game, free of explanation!

Jake decided to be super cool and create a video showing off the Propeller Knight track in Famitracker so you can see all the work that goes into the magic.  And surprise! He revealed the newest boss track for when you’re battling Propeller Knight.  That’s right!  Jake is going all out on this game and writing a battle theme for every knight.  Check out the songs below:

Supporting controllers on Steam and PCs is extremely difficult! Unfortunately, there’s no uniform way to handle support on any platform, whether it be Windows, Linux, or OS X.  None of them have figured out a unified way to read in controllers, so we’re taking it into our own hands to manually add support for every controller.

If you have a controller that doesn’t work with the current version of the Steam game, or we haven’t released the game on your platform yet, you can go to the following pages depending on your operating system of choice to help us:

Windows: Controller Binding Page for Windows

Mac OSX: Controller Binding Page for Mac

Linux: Controller Binding Page for Linux

If you wanted to be even MORE helpful, you could try out all your other weirdo controllers and enter them too! Each controller that you enter, we can make work with Shovel Knight on Steam and PC! Here are the controllers we have so far: Controller Binding Database

PS If you are still having troubles or we haven’t updated the game to support your controller yet, you can beat us to it by doing the following: 1) Open Steam, go into Big Picture Mode 2) open Settings 3) configure your controller bindings and finally 4) boot up Shovel Knight!

Hello Shovelers and Shovelettes! There are only a couple weeks until Shovel Knight’s release date of March 31. The crew at the Yacht Club is tired; we’ve been working literally every day, and every waking hour, to make the game great. But! We’re just not quite there yet.

 

We’re getting so much great feedback already about our trailer!  So we decided we’d give you a few more goodies!  Check out these tracks Jake put together.  It’s the trailer music, the trailer music with only vocals ( yeah, that’s us singing on the track! ), and Tinker Knight’s stage music.  Enjoy!

Nintendo Force spilled the beans yesterday and revealed that we’re on the cover of their final issue for year 1!  It’s a pretty freaking sweet cover if you ask me.  Erin worked her buns off jamming every major character into it, and it turned out great!  Make sure you pick it up so you can see what the back looks like.  But here’s a closer look at the front: