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Handheld gaming undoubtedly revolutionized the industry. Nintendo’s Game Boy, released in 1989, has since become the third best-selling game console of all time and has spawned hits such as Pokemon and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Even in today’s market of high-resolution graphics and big-budget franchises, some gamers and developers are still fiercely loyal to the aesthetics of handheld games. Yacht Club Games, the studio behind the upcoming action-adventure game Mina the Hollower, certainly falls into that category.
Yacht Club made a name for itself with 2014’s Shovel Knight, a side-scrolling platformer in the style of a classic NES game, which took home the Game Awards’ Best Independent Game accolade that same year. Now, the studio is working on Mina, which it calls “a love letter to th Game Boy era.” Game ZXC spoke to Yacht Club marketing head Celia Schilling about the game’s handheld influences and what’s next for the upcoming title. The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Let’s start with a quick overview of Mina the Hollower. Can you tell us a bit about the game?
A: Mina the Hollower is a love letter to the Game Boy era. We’re huge fans of handhelds, and when we were deciding on a new game to make, a Game Boy style just made sense. Yacht Club Games has a pretty open platform, so when we're deciding what games to make or to publish, everyone has a hand in that. So, two of my colleagues had similar ideas about developing a Game Boy-style game, and we as a team conjoined those ideas into Mina the Hollower.
The game is a bone-chilling action adventure featuring the gameplay and 8-bit aesthetic of the Game Boy Color, but refined for the modern era. You play as Mina: she's a bright inventor and “hollower,” who’s best known for inventing spark technology, which harnesses an experimental source of power. She gets a very concerning letter from her longtime friend, Baron Lionel, saying that her spark generators are powering down. Foul play is suspected. Confused and concerned, she sets off on a journey to see what's going on. That's where her journey starts off.
We announced Mina the Hollower at the beginning of February, and we were beyond thrilled to announce it. We also announced a Kickstarter, and it's been phenomenal. We broke through so many stretch goals, we're beyond thankful for the community and their support, and we look forward to sharing the development process as we move forward.
Q: Before we get into the more technical side of things, let’s talk about the game world. You mentioned that the main character is a “hollower.” What is that, exactly?
A: Hollowers are a super cool society devoted to studying elements and the art of burrowing. We'll have more details later on how to be a hollower.
Some elements of the game are technology versus nature, and learning more about a passion for studying the world. We're going to delve into so much more, and I'm so excited to share more with you, but we’ll have to keep it a bit more surface-layer for now.
Q: How would you describe the game’s aesthetic?
A: It’s a late-1800s Victorian Gothic setting. It’s funny, because Shovel Knight was very medieval, and now we’ve moved to the Victorian era, so we're going forward in history. Maybe next we’ll do a sick 90s game or something.
Besides taking inspiration from other games like Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and even Bloodborne, the game also took inspirations from Gothic-era writings like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,Dracula and Frankenstein. That genre tells stories in worlds that have a horrific descent from normality into something dark and spooky. I feel like our team caught the spooky bug from Specter of Torment, and we’re taking all our hopes and dreams and putting them into Mina the Hollower, since we're able to take a darker approach to it.
In our demo, we introduce a character called the Duke, who’s a kind-hearted soul, and you'll help him on a mini quest to find his lover, the Duchess. At the end of the quest, where you end up fighting the Duchess, you eventually realize that you’re bringing him to a coffin. You realize that you’re bringing the Duke to his lover, who has passed away. At first, it seems like a fun fetch quest, but it becomes sad. Things are a little bit darker in Mina, and we've definitely leaned into those tones. We're having so much fun in the writers' room right now, really getting into the nitty-gritty of it.
Q: Let’s talk about gameplay. Mina the Hollower seems like it has a bit of an RPG element. Is that a fair assessment? What are some key gameplay elements players should be aware of?
A: Oh, yeah, of course. We did use some RPG elements — my colleagues are huge fans of RPG games. There’s a currency system that uses bones, we call it “boning up.” You can upgrade skills, you can upgrade health, there's leveling up in there. Just like any other RPG, you can upgrade certain skills to appeal to your favorite playstyle. We're currently working out certain details and seeing if we’re going to add more. We have a hard time putting down the creative pen.
As for gameplay elements, like I said, we took a lot of inspiration from Link's Awakening,Castlevania, and Bloodborne. In particular, we imagined a top-down Castlevania, and then meshed that with an intense, combat-focused style. We also combined that with open-ended, top-down exploration. That’s really going to be a focus of the game. It's blending everything that we loved about certain genres of games, and truly writing a love letter to the Game Boy.
Q: The phrase ‘a love letter to Game Boy’ seems to be pretty central to Mina’s marketing scheme. Can you tell me a bit about how the developers accomplished that aim?
To paraphrase a colleague: because we wrote the game as a love letter to Game Boy, does that mean that we're being truly faithful to the genre? Well, we're making it for the modern era. There were a lot of limitations to Game Boy games. So, we're staying faithful with things like the color palette, making sure that it's an eight by eight per pixel tile, and matching the Game Boy’s four colors per sprite.
We’re staying true to that, because the Game Boy pixel sprites were beautiful, and although they really had a lot of limitations, they really expanded upon that. So we're staying true to things like that. Another example is the screen size. Game Boy screens were very small, and TVs don’t use that aspect ratio anymore. It would be pretty difficult to stay faithful to that, so we did make it a little bit larger.
We're basically combining mechanics. Sometimes it can feel like we're reinventing the wheel when staying faithful, because we’ll think of a memorable mechanic of some game, and we have to figure out how to take everything that we loved about that mechanic and make it make more sense for our game. It’s a lot of thinking about what you remember about games and love about them, and combining the two to make an experience that is reminiscent.
Q: You mentioned your Kickstarter, which closed in early March. You’ve nearly tripled your funding goal and raked in more than $1 million. You’ve announced a number of stretch goals, but how else are you going to use that cash to improve the game?
A: Well, we’ll expand the world and the community. We're delving into aspects of the game that we normally wouldn't have spent as much development time on. When people hear “development time,” they don't realize that every day of extended development is another dollar sign.
The cool thing about Yacht Club Games, and I guess also our Achilles heel, is that we have a hard time putting down the creative pen. With our Kickstarter money, we can develop a month or so longer than we would have expected to have. So we’re asking, what other cool things can we do with this? For us, it’s to really expand, build the world, and build the community. When I say community, I mean developing things like merch, since it’s a new IP. We have that opportunity as well. But, I think, the primary focus of what we're getting from the Kickstarter is going to go to the game, to build it and make it better than it could have ever been.
Q: How far along in the development process are we now? Has Yacht Club ever done Early Access for their games, or is that something you’d consider for Mina?
A: We typically don't do early access. If the world becomes a bit safer, hopefully, we'll have a really polished demo for the community to play at conventions. As for a release, we tend not to give dates until we're way closer. We want to be confident, and we don't want to have a delay extravaganza. But one thing that we can reassure our backers about, as well as your readers and anyone in the community, is that we're a very transparent company. We're always sharing where we are during our development process, so we’ll be there every step of the way.
Once we're more sure about things, we’ll be sure to drop hints: ‘Oh, it's coming soon. It's nearing the end of development.’ There are a lot of things going on in the world right now. We're dedicated to finishing this game. We're passionate people, we love this. But, we're a people-first company, and we're very transparent about that. If the world's ending, we'll develop the game from, I don’t know, under the sea. We'll figure it out. But we’ll keep everyone in the process every step of the way.
Q: What sort of future content do you have planned?
A: Right now, things aren't solidified in the pipeline. So, stay tuned for more information posted on our social media pages.
Q: Your other major IP, Shovel Knight, was a critical success. Do you expect a similar reception for Mina?
A: From what we've seen already, and how obsessed we are with Mina in general, we would assume that people are really going to like it. We're putting our hearts and souls into this project, and if you like Game Boy, and you like Castlevania, Bloodborne, and pixel art games, I think you'll like this game.
Q: Do you have any advice for smaller indie devs looking to break into the industry?
A: Use social media to your advantage, use your resources, go out and make friends if you can. Shoot off an email and say, ‘Hey, I'd love to have you as a contact. I'm working on this game.’ Develop your pitch and be vocal about it.
Take chances. In our situation, my colleagues left the different game companies where they were established, where they had worked on games, and they knew how to make games. But they took a chance, and they did everything they could — they put their heart and souls into Shovel Knight, and they made a lot of friends along the way. It became a synergy success.
So I would say it's about being vocal, making friends and believing in your project.
[END]
Mina the Hollower is coming soon for PC.