The Making Of…
How a small group harnessed its 8bit obsession to create the best NES game in 25 years
How a small studio’s 8bit obsession birthed Shovel Knight, the best NES game in 25 years
“PEOPLE WOULD COME UP TO US AND SAY, ‘DON’T MAKE IT NES HARD!’ WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANT”
No one would ever say game development is easy. But the research process for Shovel Knight was certainly no hardship for Yacht Club Games. The team has a yearly tradition known as Mega May, where the fifth month is reserved for playing through every Mega Man game. “Even if we weren’t making Shovel Knight, we would be playing them anyway,” lead programmer David D’Angelo tells us. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re making a NES game – we need to go back and play all the NES games.’ That was something we were doing anyway because we’re obsessed with those games.”
D’Angelo was one of five staff who worked together at WayForward Technologies and began to collaborate on an extra-curricular project. While it didn’t work out, the team had an unmistakable chemistry. But after the release of Double Dragon Neon, they knew they were likely to be separated. “What’s interesting about WayForward is that you rarely work with the same people over again,” D’Angelo explains. “[As] a work-for-hire company, they just put whoever they have available on a project whenever they sign something.” Something had to give – and so, in 2011, the group left to found Yacht Club Games.
Inspired by the Blue Bomber, as well as Capcom’s DuckTales and Konami’s Castlevania
III, the studio conceived a central mechanic of a versatile downward sword thrust that could be used to attack enemies from above, to bounce on hard surfaces and to dig into soft ground. Swords don’t dig, but shovels do – and Yacht Club Games suddenly had an interesting hook around which to build its game. Though crowdfunding was in its relative infancy at the time, the studio decided Kickstarter would be the best option to raise the $75,000 it sought to complete the game, a decision taken more to raise its profile than as a result of previously successful campaigns. “There wasn’t a ton of huge ones before we went to Kickstarter,” D’Angelo says. “At least not famous on the scale of Mighty No 9 or Double Fine Adventure. To us, it was more that we’d made games that people may have known, but they definitely didn’t know who we were. We thought it was a good way to get our names out there rather than trying to blindly go after media or whatever. It definitely felt like the best way we could build a community around the game.”
The gamble worked. The campaign hit its original target quickly and, as various stretch goals were reached and passed, Yacht Club found itself crowdsourcing ideas from its growing community, one of which resulted in one of the more puerile cheat codes of recent times, which replaces recurring nouns in the game’s script with the word ‘butt’. D’Angelo laughs. “That’s in there because we were doing a stream and we were at $250,000, and we were joking with our fans that we couldn’t come up with another stretch goal even if we wanted to; that if we were going to put another up there, it was going to be butt mode. And it turned out to be really popular! So we ended up putting that in.”
As silly as it sounds, it proves that Yacht Club was listening to its community. It also paid attention to feedback following a demo it took to PAX – from minor complaints about collision detection in specific areas to wider observations that made it clear that the desires of the developer and its audience were in lockstep. “People would see the Flare Wand in the demo and they’d [ask], ‘Oh, does that mean I get new armours, too? I wonder what else we’ll get’ – that kind of thing,” D’Angelo says. “Hearing how people envisioned the game growing fed into how we envisioned it growing, too.”
Another concern was the difficulty level. Though from the beginning the studio had been trying to strike a balance between a contemporary release and an 8bit game,
Shovel Knight’s retro aesthetic meant some approached the game with preconceptions about its challenge. “People would come up to us and say, ‘Don’t make it NES hard!’” D’Angelo says. “We didn’t know what that meant at first, and they explained that they meant NES games were too hard [for them] to enjoy.”
From the outset, Yacht Club had said it didn’t want to have a lives mechanic, but it still wanted to present a challenge. The trick was how to make that challenge interesting. “If I die on a section more than once, what makes me not want to put down the controller?” D’Angelo asks. The solution was a Dark Souls- like mechanic whereby Shovel Knight would drop loot upon dying, encouraging the player to try to retrieve it. “You think, ‘I need to go get that money back so I’m going to keep playing,’” D’Angelo says. “’I’m going to return to that spot and when I do, I’m going to feel good about it, as opposed to feeling crappy that I keep dying.’”
If Shovel Knight was no longer to be ‘NES hard’, it was still going to look like a long-lost 8bit game. Much as the team’s affection for the era informed the choice of aesthetic, practicality played a part in the decision. It wasn’t simply about making the biggest game it could reasonably handle, but something dense with ideas and systems. This way, Yacht Club could cut down on the time between iterations and produce something much richer in a shorter span. “In the same way a South Park episode can be whipped out in six days and be relevant and hilarious and packed with jokes, I think we had that same philosophy,” D’Angelo says. “If we have these simple graphics, we can get the boss up and running in a day, and program all of its attacks and see if it’s fun. If you look at a
Mega Man or a Zelda, oftentimes they have those scrolling screens like Shovel Knight does, when you see one room of the level at a time – and because of that, [the developer] is more conscious about making sure every square of the screen has something fun in it, and is different than the last room you saw.”
So how do you make a modern game that feels like it’s been ripped from the NES era? By reliving the classics, of course. YouTube was a
useful resource, but it didn’t compare to the experience of booting up these old games to find out what made them tick. One key discovery was the gap between the hardware’s early years and the games that came much later. “Some of the NES games are really advanced,” D’Angelo says. “They might have parallax [scrolling], for example. When you go from Mario Bros battle mode on the NES… I mean, that game looks significantly different to Super Mario Bros 3. It felt really important to go back and look at those games just to see if we were pushing things too far – even if it was still within the NES limitations.”
D’Angelo and his colleagues already had huge respect for genre classics, but through this process they gained a new kind of appreciation for the pioneers of the 8bit era – not least given the technological gap between then and now. The level-design tools Yacht Club was using alone were, after all, far in advance of anything available in the ’80s. “When you look at these games, there’s already mind-blowing inventiveness there,” D’Angelo says. “I mean, Mega Man 5 has gravity-flipping in it – it’s crazy that a game that early is already going really far out in terms of platforming wackiness. But making Shovel
Knight on modern computers made me wonder how they were able to make brilliant games so quickly with such primitive hardware. I imagine most of those NES games were drawn on paper and one programmer spent like a week figuring out pressing in text where everything should go.”
To stay true to the 8bit feel, Yacht Club established a series of ground rules for what was and wasn’t allowed; where the boundaries could be relaxed, and where they shouldn’t be pushed. The music, for example, would use the equivalent of the sound chip adopted by Castlevania III, chiefly thanks to the presence of additional voice channels. “That way, it still sounded NES enough, and it didn’t have the limitations of when a sound effect was playing and a music channel would drop out, which sounded lame,” D’Angelo explains. “It was just a matter of finding the things that we thought would make it as fun as possible and still feel like a NES game.”
Weren’t there a few complaints from purists, though? D’Angelo laughs. “We didn’t get a ton, actually, which is sort of a surprise. We definitely had people who said, ‘This doesn’t feel like a NES [game] to me’, and that’s probably because they played earlier games on the system or they just can’t handle anything breaking the limitations at all. I mean, if you see a widescreen game, it’s definitely not a NES game – there’s way too much real estate on the screen. But, yeah, we didn’t have too many people harping on about specifics, like, ’How dare you not keep this sprite inside of a tile boundary – it’s unjust!’”
The effort invested in getting Shovel Knight to run on 3DS (the team’s biggest technical challenge, D’Angelo says) paid off handsomely: only the PC version ended up outselling it. The NES connection obviously helped, with the Wii U version also outperforming its home console rivals. But D’Angelo doesn’t see any version as being superior to the others. Each one has exclusive features, from the StreetPass arena mode on the 3DS game to the use of PS4’s light bar and cross-save functionality, through to an exclusive Battletoads boss fight in the Xbox One game. That is, he says, down to the team’s appreciation for games being specifically tailored towards their host hardware. “We spent a lot of time trying to make sure that when you played it on a console, it felt like you could play it on that console and then say, ‘Oh, it’s on another system? No way!’ Making it feel super-special on [each individual] system was really important to us. That’s something we love when we play old games, so we wanted to do the same thing.” Internal sales estimates for the game came out at around 50,000 copies – the benchmark that would allow Yacht Club to make another title. Across all formats, Shovel Knight has since surpassed 1.2 million copies, a figure that continues to climb. That’s partly down to the addition of free downloadable expansions, which are keeping the game in the public eye: last year’s Plague Of Shadows will be followed by Specter Of Torment, which is set to launch in the spring. Development of that episode continues in tandem with another as-yet-untitled episode starring King Knight.
These addons were among the original stretch goals, but have expanded well beyond their original remit. “We pitched it to everyone on the Kickstarter as like a Mega Man powerup where you play as the other bosses and you go through exactly the same levels, with very slight text changes,” D’Angelo tells us. “But when Shovel Knight became so successful, we all wanted to make something bigger and cooler and unique.” Even so, the studio has gone above and beyond what any backer could reasonably have expected. “I would say at this point, they’re almost complete full games. That’s how big they are in terms of content. And Specter Knight’s going to be even bigger than Plague Knight, too, which I hope people will think is very cool.”
With cameo appearances already secured in fellow crowdfunding successes such as YookaLaylee and Bloodstained, Shovel Knight is clearly not going anywhere anytime soon. And its maker is evidently delighted to have established a new breed of horticultural hero. “We couldn’t be more grateful that everyone bought it and loved it and told everyone else to buy it,” D’Angelo says. “It’s blown us away how successful it’s been.”