Yacht Club Games
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Yacht Club Games is an American independent video game development studio and publisher founded in 2011 by former WayForward Technologies director Sean Velasco, [1] and is located in Los Angeles, CA. It is also best known as the creator of the Shovel Knight series.
- 2.1 Games Developed and Published
- 2.2 Games Published
- 2.3 Side projects
- 4 References
History [ ]
Yacht Club Games was founded by former developers from WayForward Technologies who wished to work on their own titles. The company announced their first title, Shovel Knight , on March 14, 2013. They financed its development through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and released it on June 26, 2014. [2] Following the stretched goal of the Kickstarter campaign, the developers added more content to the base game from 2015 to 2018. With each new campaign being as large as the original main game, the developers decided to change the economic model of Shovel Knight . The original game, which includes all content, was renamed Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove , and all campaigns and the Battle Mode are available to purchase separately. [3]
In addition to their own title, Yacht Club Games also published Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack in North America, an enhanced collection of the first and second Azure Striker Gunvolt games developed by the Japanese studio Inti Creates . [4]
Yacht Club Games are very active on Twitter , where they constantly post, updates, events of interest, sales in the digital shops, as well as jokes such as the Shovel Knight IRL: Physical Game Cameo Extravaganza!! .
Games Developed and Published [ ]
Games published [ ], side projects [ ], gallery [ ].
References [ ]
- ↑ New studio Yacht Club Games sails away with a crew from WayForward on Warp Zoned
- ↑ Shovel Knight on Kickstarter
- ↑ Switch-up! on yachtclubgames.com
- ↑ Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack by on yachtclubgames.com
- 2 Specter Knight
- 3 Shovel Knight
Yacht Club Games finds there’s more retro life after ‘Shovel Knight’
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There’s a difference between a love letter to a genre and a complete re-creation.
To avoid tackling ground already covered when making video games that reference the 8- and 16-bit eras of the 1980s and ‘90s, Yacht Club Games co-founder David D’Angelo says one of his go-to references is “You’ve Got Mail.” Yes, the 1998 Nora Ephron-directed rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Or, specifically, its relationship to the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch-directed film that inspired it, “The Shop Around the Corner.”
“It’s the same thing,” D’Angelo says in discussing how the West Los Angeles team behind the retro hit game “Shovel Knight” developed the mission statement for Yacht Club. Viewing “You’ve Got Mail” alongside the original “The Shop Around the Corner,” he says, can at times be a challenge for audiences weaned on more recent acting and filmmaking techniques.
“In watching ‘The Shop Around the Corner,’ I could see why someone would want to remake it,” he says. “There are so many good things in it. A lot of them translate directly to ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ but ‘You’ve Got Mail’ was modern. And yet there are so many parts of the original movie that transcend time. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re putting it in a new box that helps you understand why it’s important,” he says of each game.
Since 2013, when “Shovel Knight” became an early Kickstarter sensation, Yacht Club has been hyper-focused on games starring the hit’s titular hero — a knight, of course, armed with, well, a shovel. Sales reached 2.6 million across multiple consoles and iterations as he swung, dug and pounced his way through ghostly kingdoms filled with colorful characters, a conniving alchemist and the occasional exploding rat.
While the 24-person team isn’t abandoning its armored digger, Yacht Club is looking ahead to new projects and this year took on publishing duties, releasing “Cyber Shadow,” a title that nods to vintage Nintendo Entertainment System works such as “Ninja Gaiden” and “Shadow of the Ninja.”
The creation of Finnish developer Aarne Hunziker, “Cyber Shadow” (available for home computers and all major consoles) appealed to Yacht Club because it allowed the studio to continue mining history while attempting to refresh it.
“Cyber Shadow,” like 2018 Sabotage Studio revivalist title “The Messenger,” celebrates the quick sword-slash action of the vintage video game genre that keyed in on America’s pop-culture fascination with ninja films and ninja-inspired characters in the ‘80s. Protagonists, for instance, who operate mostly on their own but largely on the side of good. They are outsider heroes with smarts who tapped into an individualist ideal while exploring the tension between a belief in and a mistrust of institutions.
D’Angelo, now 35, doesn’t get too academic, however, when discussing his love of a genre he came to through “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” noting that the sci-fi-inspired mechanical world of “Cyber Shadow” also owes a heavy debt to “The Terminator.” The goal was a game that captured the instant approachability of NES titles, but was more forgiving to players while using varied, unexpected level design while gradually layering on abilities, all while staying true to a two-button control scheme.
D’Angelo even laughs a bit at the difficulty in explaining the addictive appeal of the works that influenced “Cyber Shadow.”
“The gameplay of it is so unbelievable simple,” D’Angelo says. “It’s sort of hard to say why it would be fun. Like, I jump and I hit an enemy and it’s dead in one slash. That’s all there is to it.”
But when it’s responsive, that frenetic energy, says D’Angelo, “really puts you in the mood of being a ninja.”
“When I press a button, I’m immediately six feet in the air, and when I press that button again, I’ve completely disintegrated a robot,” he says. “Giving that power to someone who’s even 4 years old is not something you can experience any other way.”
So what then makes “Cyber Shadow” a 2021 game rather than a 1990 one? “The main reason is just this starts really simple, and slowly over time the complexity of the character grows. It’s still a two-button game, but the number of actions you can do is 12 or something like that.”
Adds studio producer Sunni Pavlovic, “I don’t think it’s so much about capturing the retro nostalgia one for one. When I think of older games, it’s about capturing the feeling. How did that feel when you were 8 or 10? But making it still have the modern sensibilities we’re used to, whether it’s the color scheme or fonts we’re used to.”
Or more diverse characters and a broader understanding of the cultural role games can play. And while some studios and players gravitate toward retro-styled games because they crave the sometimes punishing difficulty of titles of that era, when save points were uncommon and grueling challenges were seen more as a badge of honor, D’Angelo and Pavlovic stress the Yacht Club thesis is to show that play is approachable and joyful.
“Shovel Knight,” for instance, kept things interesting with updates and new playable characters, necessitating a rethinking of the level design to respond to different abilities rather than trying to make a piece fit where it didn’t belong. While “Cyber Shadow” isn’t as vast a game — and it also isn’t exactly easy — players will discover a rhythm as new moves and interactions are learned. And while there are hidden paths and plenty of traversal, “Cyber Shadow” varies the pace with relatively intimately framed boss battles, requiring a more nuanced focus.
Above all else, however, Yacht Club’s core goal is to distill games down to a base language. It isn’t currently interested, for instance, in taking full advantage of today’s controllers with their multiple triggers and joysticks.
“It’s really complicated,” D’Angelo says. “The games are using all those buttons and using them in context-specific situations. You get in a helicopter and that controls differently than when you’re in a plane and that controls differently than when you’re walking on the ground. That could be cool, in that the complexity of the interactions leads to variety, but we were really thrilled how you could get the same level of depth out of just maybe three things.”
And while the “Shovel Knight” story is finished for now — “We’re exhausted,” D’Angelo says, referencing the eight-year focus on the brand — the studio likely won’t stay away forever. Someday, says D’Angelo, the team dreams of seeing a “Shovel Knight” cartoon become a reality, and Pavlovic succinctly sums up the Yacht Club mindset when it comes to in-house developed, non-”Shovel Knight” games.
“Something that’s really important to us is that it should be heartwarming,” Pavlovic says. “It should be uplifting. It should be positive. That’s something we need. There are world events happening around us, and I know for myself I don’t want to play a game where it’s a dystopia.”
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Shovel Knight developers’ next game is a Zelda-like you play as a mouse
Mina the Hollower is inspired by the Game Boy Color era
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Yacht Club Games, the developer behind the Shovel Knight series , announced its next game at the Yacht Club Games Presents stream on Tuesday. The studio’s next title will be an original adventure inspired by the Game Boy Color. It’s called Mina the Hollower.
The game is still early in development, Yacht Club said, and the studio is seeking funding through a Kickstarter campaign that’s live now. “We want your feedback, collaboration, and support in making Mina the Hollower the best game it can possibly be,” the developers said.
The developers released a trailer alongside its Mina the Hollower reveal. In the game, you play as Mina, a mouse who fights her way through various dungeons using a whip and other items. Like Shovel Knight , Mina features an 8-bit art style — the game’s visuals look a lot like a souped-up version of the Game Boy Color game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening from 1993. The Kickstarter page says that the team plans create a game that runs in “smooth 60 [frames-per-second] action combat.”
Yacht Club released the indie darling Shovel Knight in 2014 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Since then, the iconic shovel-wielding knight has gone on to inspire a series of spinoffs games and sequels, and even get cameos in games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate . The team announced its other upcoming title, Shovel Knight Dig , in 2019. Yacht Club’s most recently released game, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon , was released in 2021 across multiple platforms.
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Yacht Club Games reveals Mina the Hollower & accompanying Kickstarter
Mina the Hollower will be a new game from Yacht Club in the vein and aesthetic of classic Game Boy Color adventure games.
Yacht Club Games is incredibly good at channeling the old school in all of the new projects it pursues. It never ceases to inject that classic creativity in its games, even while shedding pain points of old game design. It looks to be pursuing that pedigree again with the announcement and reveal of Mina the Hollower: a top-down action adventure in the style of classic Game Boy Color games. Yacht Club will be crowdfunding this latest game on Kickstarter, starting today.
Yacht Club Games announced Mina the Hollower and its Kickstarter during the Yacht Club Games Presents event on February 1, 2022. In this homage to the Game Boy Color era, players will take on the role of the titular Mina in an 8-bit-style top-down adventure, similar to the likes of games like the original The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons. It’s described as a “world full of mystery and horror” as players will battle against various creatures and work their way through all sorts of spooky environments, laying various creatures to rest with a variety of weapons and gadgets.
Mina the Hollower oozes all of the classic aesthetic Yacht Club Games has been known to produce in beloved titles like the Shovel Knight series and the recent and rather awesome hack-and-slash side-scroller Cyber Shadow . Of course, as always, Mina the Hollower will also have modern sensibilities, such as playing at 60 fps and other such features. However, with the Kickstarter, Yacht Club Games has made it clear that fans and backers will also play a role in helping to guide the support and direction of the game.
With the Kickstarter launched, fans and players can go back Mina the Hollower now. Stay tuned for further details on the game, such as Kickstarter updates and release dates, right here at Shacknews.
TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at [email protected] and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs .
- Kickstarter
- Yacht Club Games
- Mina the Hollower
TJ Denzer posted a new article, Yacht Club Games reveals Mina the Hollower & accompanying Kickstarter
Just got an email about this. I'll throw them $20. Shovel Knight was one of the best indie games I ever played.
Shovel Knight Developer Announces a Brand New Game, Mina the Hollower [Updated]
Update: mina the hollower has already reached its kickstarter goal..
Update 02/02/22: Mina the Hollower has already met its initial Kickstarter goal, just hours after the campaign launched.
At time of writing, the game has accrued more than $370,000 USD, comfortably passing its original $311,000 goal. No stretch goals have been announced as yet but, judging by Shovel Knight's campaign, we can likely expect some to pop up along the way.
The developer of Shovel Knight has announced a brand new game called Mina the Hollower, a top-down action adventure in a Game Boy Colour style.
At its Yacht Club Games Presents event, the developer launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the new project, promising a "bone-chilling action adventure" with an 8-bit aesthetic redefined for the modern era.
The studio's release of Shovel Knight in 2014 hurtled it into mainstream success and spawned several spin-offs, but it hasn't revealed a new franchise until today (Yacht Club has published non-Shovel Knight games, but never developed one itself).
Mina The Hollower - 15 Reveal Screenshots
Mina the Hollower will, like Shovel Knight before it, combine classic and modern styles – and will feature 60 frames per second combat in a world of mystery and horror.
Yacht Club Games director and designer Alec Faulkner said the studio was returning to Kickstarter to recreate the feeling of Shovel Knight's development, which was also funded through the crowdfunding service.
"We want your feedback, collaboration, and support in making Mina the Hollower the best game it can possibly be," he said. "That’s why we’re returning to our roots and kicking off Mina the Hollower’s development as a Kickstarter campaign.
"Though we’re financing a majority of this project ourselves, we hope we can create a more expansive game this way. More importantly, we want to build a community around Kickstarter, much like we did with Shovel Knight."
Yacht Club Games didn't mention a release window for Mina the Hollower, but Shovel Knight launched 14 months after its Kickstarter campaign ended, after accruing over $300,000 in one month. PC (via Steam) was the only platform this game has been confirmed for, but Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms were all mentioned as possible destinations for Mina the Hollower.
Updates on Shovel Knight's spin-offs were also shared at Yacht Club Games Presents, such as a new character called Random Knight coming to its block-falling puzzle game Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon. Random Knight will appear after players have already recruited a handful of different knights and will become one at random upon the start of a new adventure.
Three further DLC packs are also on their way for Pocket Dungeon that will include an online versus mode, new playable characters, relics, and secrets, and mod support on PC.
Yacht Club Games also revealed that its upcoming SNES-style Shovel Knight Dig is in its final stages of development and showed new gameplay from its bug-infested Grub Pit level.
IGN called Shovel Knight "amazing" when it was released in 2014, saying its real beauty "isn't that it's a clearly worded love letter to the storied NES era; it's that it drew inspiration from nothing but great NES games."
We said Pocket Dungeon was "a wonderful spin-off that combines block-falling puzzle and roguelite mechanics in remarkably clever ways."
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17.03.2022 17:13 Evgeny Obedkov
Yacht club games releases free archive of shovel knight art from 7 years of production, published by evgeny obedkov.
- Shovel Knight ,
- Yacht Club Games
It is rare to see studios share their own assets with other developers for free. However, this is exactly what Yacht Club Games made by releasing a nearly 1GB archive containing all the art from Shovel Knight .
Earlier this month, the studio shared the news on a Kickstarter page of its new game Mina the Hollower .
Yacht Club came up with this idea way back in 2013 when an indie developer used Shovel Knights sprites as references for his own game. The team is now finally publishing a huge archive of art from their hit title under the Creative Commons license.
“1 gigabyte doesn’t sound like a lot in modern video game terms but it’s pixel art, these files are usually measured in Kilobytes,” the studio said. “It’s huge and it’s YOURS!”
As Yacht Club explained in the post, this archive is a raw repository of all Shovel Knight assets, including animations, backgrounds, menus, mockups, and even some cut content. The team hopes that this collection will enable other developers to make their own games in the future.
The whole archive can be downloaded here
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UPDATED: WayForward Employees Leave to Form Yacht Club Games
by Tyler Ohlew - March 6, 2013, 6:59 am EST Total comments: 10
The A Boy and His Blob director has made a new home for himself. UPDATE: Studio confirms who made the jump from WayForward.
UPDATE: Sean Velasco has informed us of the employees that compose Yacht Club Games; Ian Flood (lead/gameplay programmer), Lee McDole (lead/gameplay programmer), Erin Pellon (concept/illustration), Sean Velasco (designer/creative director), Nick Wozniak (technical art, animation) David D'Angelo (gameplay programmer).
As well, while they cannot confirm their upcoming announcement will release on the Wii U or 3DS, Velasco says the studio is "actively pursuing development on Nintendo Platforms!"
Several WayForward veterans have left the company to form a studio of their own under the name of Yacht Club Games.
The announcement came to us from Sean Velasco, a former-Designer/Director at WayForward. Velasco served as the director of games like A Boy and His Blob and Double Dragon Neon.
As stated on their website, Yacht Club Games' goal is to make "really awesome original games that fuse modern and retro sensibilities." Collectively, employees of the studio have worked on Contra 4, A Boy and His Blob, Double Dragon Neon, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Mighty Milky Way, Thor: God of Thunder, and Bloodrayne Betrayal.
While we wait for comment from the studio regarding its staff, we can confirm that Lee McDole, a lead programmer at WayForward, is an employee. Also, Ian Flood, Gameplay programmer at WayForward, is on board at Yacht Club Games.
Yacht Club Games will be making a product announcement in the coming days. While only speculation, the companies official Twitter account is following accounts for Android Developers, Steam (a PC video game digital distribution service), Apple iOS, Ouya (an Android-based home console), and Google Developers.
If interested, readers can visit http://yachtclubgames.com , friend them on Facebook , or follow them them on Twitter @YachtClubGames . Yacht Club Games will be at PAX East to meet fans and press.
What's going to happen to WayForward?
Would you say that they... wait for it... JUMPED SHIP?
For some reason I read that with this intonation. I don't know why. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRUq1VTiFSY
I wouldn't worry. Yacht Club Games has made efforts to point out what games they have produced, and there are notable absences. Just speculation of course, but there's no mention of Mighty Switch Force or Flip Champs, Adventure Time and Aliens Infestation. They may have been deliberate omissions! but WF is likely still a very healthy studio.
I guess shantae 3ds game is now vapor ware . :(
Uh, Matt Bozon, the creator of Shantae, isn't on that list, so I'm pretty sure the game is still coming. Reminds me, I still have to finish Risky's Revenge... stupid maze.
I wonder what prompted this.
I'm more curious if its not just a budding of WayForward. With ultimately the same people at the top.
The site said the company was founded in 2011, so whatever they've been working on has been a ways along. From the list of games they've worked on, it seems that some left almost immediately after BloodRayne to form this company. Also considering that Nintendo Force is interviewing and showing off their fist game in the next issue (and it will be shown at PAX East), I imagine the game is for 3DS moreso than Wii U. Either way, I suspect Nintendo platforms as their focus with deviations to other platforms on occasion.
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Yacht Club Games to renew focus on third-party publishing
Five years ago, Yacht Club Games released Shovel Knight on the back of an enormously successful Kickstarter campaign. Since then, the game has gone on to sell 2.6 million copies, and has made an appearance on nearly every major console, including Amazon’s Fire TV. This success has afforded Yacht Club a degree of comfort that many indies might envy, but with that comes the stress of delivering on years-old promises.
In an interview with GamesIndustry , Yacht Club COO James Chan described the team’s struggle with bringing stretch goals to its audience. “Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals,” Chan said. “We’ve been developing this for five straight years now; it’s just content updates, and it’s all free content updates, because it’s stuff we promised. We’re very lucky to have fans who bought multiple copies or are bringing other people in, which allows us to continue to make the game.”
Yacht Club’s struggle isn’t singular. In a report from March , GameDaily found that the majority of Kickstarter-funded game projects fail to ship on time. In a study that looked at the 50 most backed games on Kickstarter, only three hit their specified release date, with around 15% releasing within six months of their target dates. The rest missed their dates by more than a year, or have yet to release at all.
The reason these delays are so frequent, according to the study, usually boils down to a lack of experience in production and a desire by developers to cram their games full of features. Also a factor is the need to make sure your audience is pleased with what they see.
“The desire to impress everyone and not deliver a product that’s imperfect or below par has led to frequent wheel spinning and reiteration after reiteration,” Matt White, the designer behind Ghost Song , told GameDaily.
Still, despite the delayed content, there’s no denying the overwhelming success Shovel Knight has seen, and Chan certainly doesn’t take it for granted. The game was part of Nintendo’s renewed efforts to court third-party developers back in the Wii U days, and was a launch title for the Switch last year.
“We were lucky then, but we do still see that the Switch is a really good platform for us. It’s where gamers that speak our language are. It’s definitely going to be our main focus,” Chan told GamesIndustry.
With the upcomingexpansion King of Cards set for release this December, Yacht Club is finally ready to bid farewell to Shovel Knight and focus on other endeavors, such as publishing. Chan expressed the studio’s intention to help other indies with their projects. Yacht Club is in a position to offer other devs assistance thanks to Shovel Knight’s financial success.
“Our publishing philosophy, a lot of it is sharing knowledge,” Chan said. “They have access to our creative, we review all the work, we play the game, we record ourselves playing the game… We send all of that feedback. We try to provide that perspective.”
Yacht Club tested the publishing waters when it published the Azure Striker Gunvolt bundle with Inti Creates, but that experience stretched the studio’s small team beyond their limits.
“It was time the development team just didn’t have,” Chan said. “We were already apologetic about how long it was taking to finish King of Cards .”
Now, with a slightly larger team, Yacht Club is prepared to dedicate more resources to helping smaller indies with their games. The idea of an indie studio publishing other indie games has gained traction in the industry over the last few years. Many indies have expressed frustration with dealing with larger publishers, and a number of smaller studios are looking to subvert these frustrations by offering a more personal publishing experience.
“It’s probably a more expensive form of publishing than anyone else is doing,” Chan told GamesIndustry. “We’re not just selling a game. We’re sharing all of the knowledge we have so that they can become a successful developer, too… We hope that they come back to us for the next game, but if they don’t, that’s fine.”
The next game set to be published by Yacht Club is Cyber Shadow by developer Mechanical Head Studios.
A precedent for this business model was set in 2014 by indie developer Double Fine. After a tumultuous experience with launching Brutal Legend in 2009, amidst the chaotic Vivendi/Activision merger , Double Fine decided to launch a publishing wing called Double Fine Presents to help other devs avoid similar frustration.
Beyond publishing, Yacht Club hasn’t decided what it’s next internally-developed game will be. After five years of Shovel Knight , though, the team has certainly earned a bit of a break.
“ [King of Cards and Showdown ] is the end of the Kickstarter list. That’s it. This will be the wrap up, this will be the end of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove ,” Chan told GamesIndustry. “Then it’ll be pre-production on the next thing, which we’re not quite sure what it is yet. We’re gonna end the five year dev cycle, take a couple of weeks off, and then come back and say ‘Okay, what are we gonna do?'”
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