The game Shovel Knight is a breakout indie star, which went from a Kickstarter project to a massive hit. Since the game was first published in 2014, it has received critical and commercial success, spawned a number of expansions, and even made an appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Now for the first time, publisher Yacht Club Games is giving fans a look under the hood, showing players how the studio approaches character design.
Shovel Knight is a 2D side-scrolling platforming game. The game is well known for its art direction, featuring a beautiful 8-bit animation style, which has been compared favorably to games from the NES era. The music was also composed with the past in mind, and features contributions from Mega Man composer Manami Matsumae.
Yacht Club's guide goes through the processes of designing a character by focusing on one NPC from the recently released King of Cards expansion, the Hengineer. Interestingly enough, most of the NPC's are first portrayed as the default NPC, a horse-person, while the developers figure out the gameplay function of the character. Once the developers understand how the character will relate to gameplay, they then move on to the actual design process.
The Hengineer is an NPC that sells the player items and upgrades from the engine room of a flying ship. Yacht Club figured that a character who's on a flying ship should be a bird, so the developers got to work on a number of different bird NPCs. They eventually settled on a design inspired by Rosie the Riveter because it felt thematically connected to working in an engine room. Finally, they moved on to creating the sprite art. That art is inspired by classic games like Battle Toads, which funnily enough, makes a cameo in Shovel Knight.
While making the sprite art, Yacht Club limits itself to only 5 colors per character. This is the same limitation that NES games had, and Yacht Club wants to stay true to that style. It's this kind of attention to detail that makes Shovel Knight one of the most popular pixel art games. Finally, the character is animated, getting both an idle animation and active animation. This helps makes the world of Shovel Knight feel alive.
The whole Yacht Club post is worth a read, as it goes in-depth about all of the steps. Posts like this are a fantastic opportunity both for game designers looking to up their skills, and for casual fans to get a sense of the amount of work that goes into the games they love.
Shovel Knight is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Yacht Club Games
