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 franchise holder. “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.”
Esta historia es de la edición July 2020 de Edge.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición July 2020 de Edge.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
Anyone familiar with the concept of kitbashing is already halfway to understanding what Tomas Sala’s open-world builder is all about.
Children Of The Sun
René Rother’s acrid revenge thriller – an action game with its limbs broken and forcibly rearranged into the shape of a spatial puzzler – is at once a bonafide original and an unlikely throwback. Cast your eyes right and you wouldn’t blink if we told you this was a forgotten Grasshopper Manufacture game from the early PS3 era (we won’t be at all surprised if this finds a spot on Suda51’s end-of-year list).
Post Script
What does Rise Of The Ronin say for PS5 exclusivity?
Rise Of The Ronin
Falling in battle simply switches control to the next person up, and then quick revive fixes everything
Post Script
The pawn and the pandemic
Dragon's Dogma 2
The road from Vernworth to Bakbattahl is scenic but arduous. Ignore the dawdling mobs of goblins, and duck beneath the chanting harpies that circle on the currents overhead, and even moving at a hurried clip it is impossible for a party of four to complete the journey by nightfall.
BLUE MANCHU
How enforced early retirement eventually led Jonathan Chey back to System Shock
THE MAKING 0F.... AMERICAN ARCADIA
How a contrast of perspectives added extra layers to a side-scrolling platform game
COMING IN TO LAND
The creator of Spelunky, plus a super-group of indie developers, have spent the best part of a decade making 50 games. Has the journey been worth it?
VOID SOLS
This abstract indie Soulslike has some bright ideas