Hot on the heels of its success, we got chance to talk to Sean Velasco and Nick Wozniak over at Yacht Club Games to talk Shovel Knight, fan art, troupples, how to start off as an indie developer and much more.
SF: So how are you all reacting to the success of Shovel Knight so far? Yahtzee gave you a glowing review so you must be pleased with that?
NW: *laughs* Yes, as glowing reviews as he gives.
SV: Yeah, he usually doesn’t like anything so to have him say that was just great. I mean we got Game of the Month from the 3 major outlets like IGN, Gamespot and Game Informer and just glowing reviews from everywhere. People just talking about the game coming out of the woodwork…
NW: Nines from loads of places.
SV: Yeah, just critically and personally received really well.
NW: It’s been insane. We’ve just been completely floored and completely busy, answering questions and support emails. I mean whenever a game comes out and a huge swathe of people are playing it, you’re going to get some problems so there’s been a bug here and there, there’s been some issues of people getting the wrong version of the game, they need to get the other version so we’ve been doing a lot of support.
SF: Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you about the EU localisation. You’re probably sick to death of that question and the blog post you released, talking about how it is coming along helped a lot of people.
NW: Yeah, just point more people towards that post.
SF: From my experience playing, it seemed quite clear that there were certain elements of old platformers that you wanted to improve on, like the addition of the checkpoint system instead of using lives. Was there a clear set of design choices you wanted to innovate on during the development of the game, or did it just come naturally?
NW: That’s definitely a theme we embraced, of taking old tropes and bring them under the lens of modern game design. It was really important to us that we didn’t directly reference old games and fall back on old tropes because they had been done before.
SV: Right, we didn’t just want to copy something because it’s from an old NES game, like this screen transition was something that worked in Megaman and Mario, let’s just do that again exactly without trying to analyse it or think about it. Pretty much everything we did, like the checkpoints, when we pitched Shovel Knight or when we did the Kickstarter, we didn’t know that was going to be the checkpoint that was finally in the game.
SF: Like the invisible boss checkpoints in Megaman?
SV: Right. So, we wanted to have a physical checkpoint instead and then after that, we decided we wanted to tie that to our money system, so it was a holistic thing for everything really.
NW: We thought about how many checkpoints there are going to be and not just the system but how the system is used and how its integration works with the overall game feel, so you don’t walk away feeling like ‘oh I’ve played this game before’ or ‘that wasn’t really much improved on [from old games]’. We thought that this is a new game, it is a new voice which needs to exist with all these other games at the same time.
SV: We built these features over a very long period of time. Like the checkpoints, we were iterating on them for the entire development cycle and the final implementation wasn’t done till probably a couple of months before we shipped. So that how many of the elements ended up being developed, like the subweapons are very much like that, like we had ideas on what we wanted them to be but we had to massage them and iterate on them, make sure that they were different enough from each other or that they were useful. Some of the objects seemed really overpowered or some were really useless and weak so I think we landed in a spot where there’s a pretty decent use for each of the subweapons in the game.
It was just things like that, of iterating on things over a long period of time and trying to take a critical look at everything, from the way to the controller functions, to how the screen transitions work, to how each level is laid out, to boss battles, to text, to everything.
SF: With the recent problems that have arisen with people not being able to fulfil their Kickstarter projects, what are your thoughts on using the crowd funding system, after going through it and having such a success with it?
NW: We’ve been able to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that other companies have run into. I think that has a lot to do with our experience in the past, we’ve actually shipped games before. A lot of us worked at WayForward, doing Shantae as well as a bunch of licensed titles like a Batman game…
SV: We worked on Batman, what other licensed games did we work on?
NW: We did a Smurfs game, something for the Wii I think.
SV: Yeah, we did other licensed stuff like, let’s see, iCarly * Nick laughs* you know, stuff like that. These projects come in and it’s ‘Okay, we need this game to be done, the budget is limited and it is a very specific number so that means we only have a very specific number of months in order to finish it and we can only have a team of a certain size.’
NW: We had to know how we can choose the team and how they can work in a really high pressure situation like that.
SV: We had to build that efficiency and we had to know how long it takes, or at least have some idea of how long it takes to submit a game, to get something out and to get it localised. We have a vague idea of what things should cost so we can scope out stuff a lot more easily than say, indie devs who have never done this before.
NW: We had insight into some pitfalls we can avoid as we are developing a game and a lot of things you are wrangling when you are developing a game and a lot of the pitfalls you can fall into, and just having the experience of having shipped a game and completing a game from start to finish has been really helpful for us to make Shovel Knight from the ground up.
SV: I mean, between us, we have worked on games like A Boy and His Blob, Contra 4, Bloodrayne Betrayal, the Thor game, Aliens Infestation…
NW: Did you work on that?
SV: I did some animations for it.
NW: Oh nice!
SV: I mean, all these games are side scrolling platformers and so on all these games, we got experience making this genre. I mean, Shovel Knight looks like an NES game and it feels like an NES game but the experience we had making side scrolling platformers helped and carried so much into what we are making now. This is a game type we’ve made before, this is a game type which we love and it’s in our hearts to make a game like this.
SF: It is your blood this genre so you know what you need to make a good one.
SV: That’s like my existence, like 2D platformers.
NW: I’ll have to say, even though that’s who we are and that’s the game we endeavour to make and even with the knowledge we had and that base, we still had problems working on the game. There were still issues that we ran into. Scheduling was a big one, just figuring out our work flow week to week and getting sprints set up, stuff like that. There was a lot we had to figure out so we can’t imagine that anyone who is running a Kickstarter and who is developing a company from the ground up from nothing, or hiring people on the fly as they go…
SV: Having a team that you don’t know, that seems impossible. If you’ve never done a game before, doing a game and a Kickstarter for the first time, that just seems like a formula for disaster.
NW: I mean, it seems an insurmountable challenge for us. I don’t think I could do that.
SV: *laughs* I mean, I’m sure there are people with plenty of wherewithal who could pull that sort of thing off, but for us…
NW: There’s no way.
SF: It needs to be all prepared.
NW: Exactly. So that would be my reaction to a lot of the Kickstarters failing, or things come up and the team can’t accomplish the things that they promised. I mean, that would happen to us when we were at WayForward, we get pretty far in making a game and then the game would just get cancelled. It was just come from not following through on what you promised or it just wasn’t working out. For whatever reason, the game would just get cancelled and that happened a couple of times and that’s unfortunate, but that’s just the reality of game development sometimes. You work on a project and it just doesn’t go through.
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SF: It’s a bit early to ask about a Shovel Knight 2 but how is the extra content coming along? For example, how is the Battle Mode coming along and how are the three guest knights going to play?
SV: We are so excited to get started on those!
NW: *laughs* Yeah, like now, everything consumed with the press junkets, the craziness of just doing a release is just all overwhelming right now.
SV: 100% of our time right now is just being taken up fielding support questions. We want to be there and we want to be there to meet you and have our localised versions out. We still have obligations for the 1.0 version of Shovel Knight that we need to fulfil before we really dive into that update content.
NW: Yeah, just that finish line is more like a finish block of time, so we are still doing release stuff. After that’s done, we hope to sit down and scope out the project and really think about what our next update’s going to be, figuring out the specifics of how that’s going to work.
SV: Then we can announce stuff and get things out.
NW: We are looking forward to brainstorming and dedicating some time to that. I mean, we haven’t been developing a game for months.
SF: You want to get back into it, you’re missing the fire of game development.
SV: Exactly, we want to get back to it and hit the ground running.
NW: When did we announce our launch? Was it May when we said we were finished?
SV: Yeah, I think it was in May. Since we announced the launch, we haven’t actually done any game development at all.
NW: It’s been like 3 months, I can never get used to that. It always been in the past, with other projects, that even before a project is totally done, you’re already on the next one so you are constantly working on game and I like that flow but it’s been cool. It’s been a real new experience, it’s been fun but really different to what we’re used to.
SF: I can’t go this long into the interview without asking about Shovel Knight’s phenomenal music. How was it working with Manami Matsumae and virt to create the soundtrack? It sounds so authentic compared to an old NES game.
NW: It’s super authentic! Actually, the soundtrack is the most authentic part in its spirit and also its technicality.
SF: Didn’t you cannibalise an NES to get the sound chip in order to make the soundtrack?
NW: Yeah. Jake (virt) works with a program, for Shovel Knight anyway, called Famitracker, which is actually more like a spreadsheet/math problem than composing software and it outputs the real data you can use to create a Nintendo sound format/audio file. A couple of weeks ago, we were at SuperCon in Florida and he had taken the soundtrack, because we were distributing the Famitracker files, he had taken the files and burned them to a real 72 pin NES/Famicom cart with an emulated vrc6 chip and was running the soundtrack of the console.
SF: That’s so cool.
NW: It was insane! It was so cool to see and it was this kid, like this 20 year old music genius who was a great guy, and he ran the soundtrack off the console and it sounded exactly the way it does in the game. I was really surprised, I was expecting some distortion as it was coming out of the Famicom, a bit of weirdness but it sounded perfect. It was a real testament to Jake’s devotion to that artform of making great chiptune music.
SV: I mean, Jake is very involved with everything we do. For the Shovel Knight project, he didn’t just help out with the music but he was also here talking through story points, Jake helped out writing a lot of the jokes and dialogue in the game. We sat in a collaborative environment and worked through all of that stuff together. So it’s kind of, especially all the bar room dialogue, that’s 100% Jake and that’s just him and his personality. So, his mark is all over this game and it wouldn’t have had as much heart if we hadn’t his amazing and authentic contributions.
And then, we had fricking Manami Matsumae do these songs too, which was completely unbelievable and that deal kind of fell out of the sky for us. We were approached by Brave Wave, the company that represents her and we thought it was BS!
SF: I bet you thought ‘No, that can’t be true!’
NW: *laughs* Yeah, we thought ‘is this the real person?’ A weird amount of detective work went into verifying if it was true or not.
SV: And so, we found out it was the real thing and now, we have these two Manami tracks in the game and now she’s doing even more stuff like Mighty No. 9 and writing Heart Forth, Alicia. I dunno, it’s just incredible just to have two legends in Jake, who is in his height and his prime and is making the best chiptune stuff out there based on the work of the legendary Manami. She was just his inspiration for so much stuff that he does, it’s just a dream team.
NW: Yeah, we could not have asked for a better team for the music.
SF: I have to ask this as I have made him dance about 50 times, who came up with the Troupple King?
NW: *laughs* You’ve watched the dance multiple times?
SF: I love his dance, I think it’s great.
SV: Well, the original idea came from when Erin, our concept artist and illustrator here, saw a cardboard box that was selling apples, like Washington Apples which had a picture of a trout on the box. We thought, what do those two things have to do with each other? It was an apple crate with a picture of a trout on it, it’s just bizarre. So we started joking about it and it was just a tiny thing, a post-it note which said ‘Troupple’ which was trout and apple put together, with a drawing, not too far from what the regular troupples look like you find dangling from the Troupple Tree in the lagoon now.
After that, this was before Shovel Knight was even conceived of and when Shovel Knight finally came along, we thought we have to try and put troupples in there somewhere so it just kind of came together like that. We know we wanted to have some kind of overly long, unskippable dance that the player would have to do and it had to be somewhere between dumb and funny.
NW: *laughs* Somewhere between dumb and funny? That doesn’t have a great ring to it. No, I’m joking, it’s perfect.
SV: Yeah, just dumb and funny with a picture of the Troupple King in the middle. So, we just put it in there and it worked out great within the universe so that was the initial idea. Woz (Nick) animated the Troupple King and did all the wonderful animations for it and David D’Angelo did the Troupple King dance programmatically so he’s programming in the dance moves and of course, Jake wrote the song which was incredible. Erin then designed the whole damn thing so it was really a collaboration between everyone, just like everything else is. I must mention that Morgan, our intern at the time, did a background, the Troupple King background so about 7 people touched that thing to make it happen and it came out just awesome.
SF: If you had to give some advice to any fledgling indie devs out who are just getting out on the scene, what would your advice be to them?
SV: Be ready. Prepare and don’t think about your game just as a game, think about it as everything. Think about it as your development, your game is your marketing, your game is talking to media people, your game is maybe if you are making merchandise. There is so much to do outside of making your game. If you are an indie dev, it is especially, especially important to know if your legal stuff has been taken care of, that your lawyer things are all done, that your accounting is sorted. In addition to making the game, there is a whole other world of business that you have to keep in mind.
NW: That makes sense for someone who already knows and who probably has made a few games in the past but if you are a fledgling just starting off, if you are a programmer, just learn programming by making a small game. If you are just coming out of high school or middle school, do small projects you can accomplish tied to yourself or a small team of people that you can trust.
SV: If you want to design, start designing stuff by just writing it down. Just design a board game that works exactly like a video game, if you don’t have programming chops or anything. On top of that, if you are a designer, go into games which have level design programs like Megaman Powered Up which has a level editor. There are plenty of games with 3D level editors which are around everywhere which you could use to develop your skills.
NW: Unreal’s pretty good for that stuff.
SV: Yeah. If you’re an artist and want to be a 3D artist, get yourself a 3D program and start doing it.
NW: Before that, just learn the basics for art. The path for animation for any animator is to start with pen and paper and learn it from the very basic ground up.
SV: There are so many tools available. Learn the fundamentals, don’t get bogged down in the program itself, programs change over time but the talents you develop. Work in a team, I’d say if you working to be a game developer, working with your team is one of the most important things so you need to give and receive criticism without being offended or being offensive. You need to be able to kill your babies, if you have an idea that you think is so great and everyone say it isn’t, you are probably wrong.
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SF: Kill your darlings is a thing I’ve learnt to keep in mind from writing, don’t be afraid to get rid of an idea if it isn’t working out and start on something new.
NW: Right but don’t also be afraid to iterate on what you already have and improve it. A lot of the times something isn’t working, don’t trash it and start it over, a 20% change can make all the difference.
SV: I’d also say get players in front of your game. If you’re developing a game, make sure to do that early and often because a lot of game developers have a tendency to want to hold onto their projects and be like ‘It’s not ready to be played!’ but if it’s not ready to be played, it’s not a game. You need to get it in front of people and if they have a terrible time and they hate it, I mean that’s what happened with Shovel Knight, people came in and they played it and there were things in there that were just awful.
Of course, that breaks your heart when you’re watching someone play and they don’t get it or they’re not enjoying the thing that you were hoping that they’d love so much but that thing of thing is constructive and so when you have some who is not enjoy it or not understanding it, it gives you the tools to go back and change the game and make it more comfortable or to make people enjoy it more.
SF: Okay, the heavy stuff done, now for some lighter questions. Are there any games you are really looking forward to?
NW: Well, I haven’t actually played Dark Souls II yet, so I’m looking forward to playing that. That’s my prime result on working on Shovel Knight so much and crunching on it, I haven’t had time to play many games from the first half of the year.
SV: I don’t really know what’s coming out. I really want to play Don’t Starve together, that sounds awesome.
NW: I really want to try out Destiny, see what that’s like.
SV: I’m also really into the Oculus Rift right now, anything that’s really 3D or VR is really exciting for me because we are making Shovel Knight.
SF: Is there going to be a VR Shovel Knight?
SV: *laughs* At E3, that was my first real time to try it out and I was just blown away. Even though it was just the Gen 1 hardware, just putting it on and it was just like going to another place. It’s such a cool experience, I would just like to see a fun application of it and really get my hands on it.
SF: I’ve seen people playing Super Mario 64 for the Oculus Rift and it looks really weird to get used at first to but it looks super fun once you get used to it.
SV: I started to feel a little nauseous after I’d played a game for about 15 minutes. I had to take it off as I was feeling sick.
NW: Really? I didn’t get that at all.
SV: You were playing a demo where you were taking the glasses off a lot.
NW: Yeah, the thing I was playing was really cool as I had the headphones on and when I was looking at it through the Oculus, it was totally different to when you were looking at it on the laptop in front of me. It was constantly switching in between and hearing different story bits in my ears, all of it was very immersive and very cool. I’ve never really seen something like that.
SV: I’ve just started Mario Sunshine again and I’m trying to get all of the blue coins. Okay, the blue coins in Sunshine, first of all, there’s like two hundreds of them.
SF: It’s ridiculous how many you have to get to get all of the shines sprites in the game.
SV: You have to get every coin and if you miss one, there’s no checklist to tell you if you missed it and they appear and disappear based on which shine you’re playing. So, the only way to get them is to meticulously keep track of every coin which is exactly what I’m doing. It’s like dammit, this is no fun but I need to do it! So that’s what I’m torturing myself with now.
SF: If you two had to be any of the Order of No Quarter, who would you be?
NW: If we had to pick one?
SF: Yeah, which one of the knights would you be.
SV: Propeller Knight.
NW: Yeah, he’s pretty cool.
SV: He flies an airship around, that’s pretty great.
NW: I think Polar Knight’s cool.
SV: You’re already not too far from Polar Knight.
NW: Spectre Knight’s cool too, he can fly.
SV: You want to be an undead Grim Reaper?
NW: I like to fly, yeah.
SF: You’d be pretty badass as Spectre Knight.
SV: But so is Propeller Knight and we can’t both be Propeller Knight.
SF: Finally, what has been the best Shovel Knight-related thing you’ve seen since the game’s launch? Like art or Let’s Plays or cool streams?
NW: There was an animation on Twitter that somebody made and that was pretty cool, of Shovel Knight in the dream sequence, fighting a bunch of bonelings and catching Shield Knight in the air.
SV: I saw that. There was that image that got posted of the Black Knight and Shovel Knight each facing in opposite directions and it’s night time. The Black Knight is at a campfire and Shovel Knight at a campfire and Shovel Knight is holding Shield Knight’s helmet and the Black Knight is holding a feather from the Enchantress, with them both looking off wistfully into the distance.
NW: That was just an incredible piece.
SF: I’ve seen the one of Shovel Knight being reflected in the Shield Knight’s shield, that was a good one.
NW: I’ve seen that picture, that was cool.
SV: There was a really cute one of Shield Knight resting her elbows on Shovel Knight’s head as she’s way taller than him, that was super adorable.
NW: It’s cool to see the adorable/humorous take on their relationship.
SV: The Let’s Play videos and the speedruns are especially great, since a ton of people are doing them. We are just watching that stuff nonstop. There are a few secrets that we put in there specifically for speedrunners to try and find and just to see them break the game and exploiting it, we are really into that.
NW: There was the SGC one, the Ironman of Gaming run recently where someone had 9,000 gold in that. It blows me away as I had only 6,200 gold and I thought I did everything I could.
SV: Like, the top score in the office is about 6 or 7 thousand and they just blew it away. I mean it’s just everything. I can’t believe Zero Punctuation did a review of it, to hear him blabbling at a million miles an hour about Shovel Knight. Or CliffyB tweeting about it! Something like Shovel Knight is tickling…
SF: Shovel Knight is tickling my 12 year old self. That was a bit weird.
NW: Yeah, that was a bit weird.
SV: But still, just to have that happen. I mean the Game Grumps are playing it, I’m loving their series of it and the Two Best Friends did a thing on it. There is just so many videos and just so much art. I mean, someone did a hilarious series of 6 4-panel Shovel Knight comics that were just hilarious. They are completely unrelated but one is just Shovel Knight talking to Propeller Knight and asking why do you have that helmet and he is just wooing some lady and clinking their wine glasses together. Suddenly the door slams and someone shouting ‘Honey I’m home!’ and Propeller Knight just flies out the window and that’s why he has it. I mean, there’s just been so much creativity.
NW: It’s cool seeing people grabbing the characters and running with them.
SV: Yeah, we love that. The more art, we are running some contests, we want to see lots of Shovel Knight stuff.
SF: Well, that’s all of my questions. Thank you so much for talking to me and I wish you all the best with the future of Shovel Knight.
It was great to talk to the guys behind Shovel Knight and really hear about the game’s development and some of the inspirations behind certain characters. Look forward to more Shovel Knight when the new updates coming out in the near future.