Studio Profile
With Shovel Knight finally finished, its maker turns its hand to publishing, and more
Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games turns its hand to publishing, and more
Shovel Knight wasn’t meant to take seven years to complete. But then again, Yacht Club Games has never worked to much of a plan. This Los Angeles-based indie developer has instead bobbed along in the rushing flow of its first game’s success, taking opportunities where it’s found them, seeing its characters featured as Amiibos and in Smash Bros, and becoming a publisher and a franchiseholder. “I feel we’re like the people trading a paper clip right up to a car and then the house,” says co-founder Sean Valasco.
After all, Yacht Club built all this on a game that evokes the simplicity of the golden age of NES platformers. Shovel Knight was meant to be finished in September 2013, six months after the end of its Kickstarter campaign. But even before it was actually playable, and before most of the game had even been conceived and designed,
Shovel Knight had taken on a life of its own.
Yacht Club Games emerged from WayForward, the Los Angeles-based developer famous for the Shantae series and other snappy 2D action games. There, Valasco, programmer and designer David D’Angelo and three other developers had become friends as they worked on licensed titles like BloodRayne: Betrayal and
Double Dragon Neon. But as a work-for-hire and publisher-beholden company, WayForward had a tendency to break up its development teams, shifting members between projects as they waxed and waned, and as it signed new deals with partners. “We wanted to stay together,” says D’Angelo. “We realised that we clicked and if we could make something else, it’d be way better.”
“And also we could control the marketing, and be able to present the game in a way we thought would show it best,” says Valasco. “Most of the time at WayForward that was out of our hands, and it was frustrating.”
The idea of jumping ship together came before a game, but they knew they wanted to make something that revitalised ideas which had been discounted by new conventions. Surely they’d find a hole in the market. They liked working within limitations, too, the creative challenges in designing around restriction. And so Shovel Knight
was conceived, a platformer rooted deeply in NES’ 13-colour spectrum and the design affordances of its 6502 processor. Valasco quit WayForward and founded Yacht Club Games in 2011, and as the others joined him they began working out of his apartment.
“It wasn’t really acrimonious, but you know, when people leave your company to form another, you’re not necessarily going, ‘Go for it!’ Although, to their credit, WayForward came around,” says Valasco. In fact, WayForward shared some of its tools and sales data. But the nascent Yacht Club Games still needed money, and the team knew that to sign with a publisher would mean handing over control of its marketing again.
In 2012, Kickstarter was in the ascendant. Double Fine Adventure had closed its $3.3 million campaign in March, and so, to Yacht Club, crowdfunding looked like the ideal way to score
“EVERYONE THOUGHT IT WAS A MEGA
MAN GAME, SO WE WERE GOING TO
REALLY BLOW OUT THEIR EXPECTATIONS”
capital as well as to build a fanbase. But Valasco says the team wasn’t thinking particularly strategically. “It seems crazy now, but we didn’t have that much of a plan,” he says. Indeed, D’Angelo puts what happened next to being in the right place at the right time, but it was much more down to Yacht Club’s responsiveness to feedback, and the promise in its 8bit tribute.
Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign consumed the studio for three months. The team went to PAX, figuring out on the fly how to promote a game at an expo. They hurriedly worked out new mechanics and produced images and character designs, because at the time, Shovel Knight was just a video. “There was nothing else, so we crammed the work, just any content we could put up there and show,” remembers Valasco.
It worked. Shovel Knight was funded to the tune of $311,502 (£250,000) in April 2013. It wasn’t Double Fine- successful, but it was more than the $75,000 the studio asked for. The money meant it could move out of Valasco’s apartment
and into a window-less office. More significantly for Shovel Knight, the campaign transformed it.
“I mean, we thought it’d be a short game,” says D’Angelo, laughing. “But because it was funded so well we realised we could make a big, meaty game.” But more than that, the team involved backers in Shovel Knight’s development. Five backers who’d pledged for the $1,000 tier were ‘Director For A Day’, which meant they helped to design characters – four of them worked on Shovel Knight’s optional Wandering Traveller sub-bosses. Yacht Club held Design Hangouts. “We had 50 to 100 backers and we’d say: ‘OK, we’re doing Lost City, here’s the stage. What ideas would be cool here?’” says D’Angelo.
More subtly, backers brought to Shovel Knight their expectations of what a NES-inspired game should be, giving Yacht Club a baseline upon which it could build. “Everyone thought it was a Mega Man game, so we were going to totally fool them and really blow out their expectations,” continues D’Angelo. That’s why you get a Super Mario Bros 3- style overworld map that opens out as you beat levels, challenges you with Wandering Travellers to battle, and adds a suite of ability-granting relics to buy, as well as a raft of secrets and sub-quests.
Shovel Knight was released in June 2014 to immediate acclaim, and Yacht Club began to work on the stretch goals it promised during the Kickstarter campaign, including making three of the boss characters playable. Starting with Plague Knight, the devs had no idea they’d still be working on it in 2019. “Every year we were like, ‘This will definitely be the last year,’” says Valasco. As with the original release, they found the Plague Of Shadows update becoming bigger than they were anticipating. They tweaked every level and
boss encounter to fit Plague Knight’s movement capabilities and attacks, and gave it a fresh story.
Next, the team felt they had to make Specter Knight’s update a little bigger than Plague Of Shadows. So Specter Of Torment, which was released in 2017, features another remix of Shovel Knight’s levels and a do-over of its overworld map. “We were trading on our popularity for each one,” says Valasco. “When Specter Of Torment came out it was when the Switch launched, so we got a bunch of sales, and then we could make King Knight even bigger and better than we had initially imagined. At any time the sales could totally have fallen off and the next one would have been very short, but that didn’t happen.” So for King Of Cards, released in November 2019, they did it all over again, this time adding a card battle minigame called Joustus and a multiplayer game called Shovel Knight Showdown.
Yacht Club released each campaign as a free update for existing owners and raised the price of the base game to fit its greater value, and also released standalone versions, mostly to have a new release that could hit the front page of the stores. “We tried to follow the Minecraft model, which is a game that was really small and they charged one price for it, and they kept on adding and adding to it, even today, so it’s almost a service,” says Valasco.
It’s been so successful that it’s easy to forget it all started as the need to fulfil Kickstarter campaign promises. “We wanted Yacht Club to be a company for which there’s only goodwill,” says D’Angelo. “Especially for our first product. In the same way we surprised and excited everyone with what Shovel Knight could be between the Kickstarter campaign and the release, we want to do the same thing with each game.”
“If we made five separate games, maybe we would have made a zillion more dollars, but who knows, right?” adds Valasco. “At least, it kept Shovel Knight in the popular consciousness for six years and counting. That’s been really important.”
Remarkably, the team isn’t sick of Shovel Knight. It helped that they weren’t just remaking the platformer: “Joustus was a whole different thing, making a card game within a game and figuring out how they’d work together, and then doing a four-player multiplayer game with Showdown,” says Valasco. Then there was the Shovel Knight Amiibo (“I remember when we got the approval to be on Nintendo to begin with,” says D’Angelo. “It was just bananas!”), another demonstration of Yacht Club’s knack for blending right-place-righttime luck with smart preparation.
“When the Amiibo opportunity came up, we had that stuff in place: Shovel Knight on cereal boxes and bedsheets, T-shirts, a cartoon show and a comic book,” says Valasco. “It was always part of the idea.”
“We try to put ourselves in a place to be lucky,” says D’Angelo. “We got these marketing deals because when someone asked us to do a toy, we knew how to do it. Nintendo could come to us and we didn’t have to shrug and look like fools.” While Shovel Knight hasn’t yet made it to breakfast tables, a studio called Panda Cult Games Kickstarted a licensed board game, Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels, last September.
Yacht Club has also published games, starting with the Western physical release of Inti Creates’ Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack in 2017. Yacht Club went into that project wanting to help out friends, and now it’s expanded its list, backing Mechanical Head Studios’ 2D action platformer
Cyber Shadow (featured on the first page of this profile), Nitrome’s Roguelike Shovel Knight spinoff, Dig, and, most recently, Roguelike puzzler Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon by Cavern Kings
developer Vine. D’Angelo says the studio sees publishing as a chance to help out promising projects, but it’s also an opportunity to build on
Shovel Knight. “We simultaneously want to be a small studio and have as many spinoffs as Mario.
We can’t do both, so publishing might make sense as the way to do that,” says Valasco.
Now, with Shovel Knight’s final update done, Yacht Club is in the process of hiring five or so
“WE TRY TO PUT OURSELVES IN A PLACE
TO BE LUCKY… WHEN SOMEONE ASKED US
TO DO A TOY, WE KNEW HOW TO DO IT”
staff members and figuring out how it can work on two games simultaneously without losing the sense of a single team that’s powered it through to today. And as for what form these games might take, the team’s still thinking about revitalising old ideas, and about genres which have been forgotten but still hold promise. “What could we do with shmups?” wonders Valasco. “Summon another ship, like a soapstone, and you fight the boss together? 100 ships go into the battle, only one remains?”
“We shouldn’t make a shmup,” says D’Angelo. “No one buys them and hasn’t for the last five years.” Even if Yacht Club never set out with a plan, over the past seven years it’s found a balance between creativity and popularity, design and marketing, a mindset that’s driven seven years of development and the ambition to put a pixelated spade-wielding knight on a cereal box.