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Boss Fight Books #19
Shovel Knight
In 2014, Yacht Club Games released its very first game, Shovel Knight, a joyful 2D platformer that wears its NES influences on its sleeve. This unlikely pastiche of 8-bit inspirations manages to emulate the look, feel, and even the technical limitations of nostalgic titles like Mega Man, Zelda II, and Castlevania III—imbued with a contemporary sense of humor and self-awareness. But how is a fundamentally retro game created in the modern era? And what do the games of the past have to teach today's game designers?
Based on extensive original interviews with the entire Yacht Club Games team, writer David L. Craddock unearths the story of five game developers who worked so well together while at WayForward Games that they decided to start their own studio. From the high highs of Shovel Knight's groundbreaking Kickstarter to the low lows of its unexpectedly lengthy development, Boss Fight presents a new master class in how a great game gets made. Get ready to steel your shovel and dig into this fascinating oral history. For Shovelry!
Based on extensive original interviews with the entire Yacht Club Games team, writer David L. Craddock unearths the story of five game developers who worked so well together while at WayForward Games that they decided to start their own studio. From the high highs of Shovel Knight's groundbreaking Kickstarter to the low lows of its unexpectedly lengthy development, Boss Fight presents a new master class in how a great game gets made. Get ready to steel your shovel and dig into this fascinating oral history. For Shovelry!
44 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
17 people are currently reading
301 people want to read
About the author
David L. Craddock
45 books103 followersDavid L. Craddock lives with his wife in Ohio. He is the bestselling author of
Stay Awhile and Listen
: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book I, and
Heritage
: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles, an epic fantasy series for young adults. Please follow along with him on his website/blog at
DavidLCraddock.com
.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
November 29, 2019
While there were some interesting insights into the development of Shovel Knight, and while Craddock's writing is clear and to-the-point, this just isn't a terribly compelling story. Shovel Knight's development plays out pretty much like you'd expect, and while I think the cohesive dev team made for a great game and a good work environment, it doesn't make for an exciting story.
I do think there's a missed opportunity here to talk more about crowd-funded games, what the results are like, how many of them sink or swim, and so on. Shovel Knight was initially crowd-funded, and it's certainly one of the more successful games of that type.
I do think there's a missed opportunity here to talk more about crowd-funded games, what the results are like, how many of them sink or swim, and so on. Shovel Knight was initially crowd-funded, and it's certainly one of the more successful games of that type.
April 8, 2019
An interesting insight into the founding of Yacht Club Games and their initial ideas and design decisions for Shovel Knight, as well as explaining a bit of the history of some NES game design practices and limitations. A great, quick read for any fan of YCG and Shovel Knight.
December 18, 2024
Intéressant
Mange pas de pain, mais c’est normal c’est un livre.
Si ça mangeait du pain, ce serait un canard.
En sa qualité de canard, il aurait 0. Beaucoup trop de texte, aucune plume.
Là bah, c’est intéressant.
Mange pas de pain, mais c’est normal c’est un livre.
Si ça mangeait du pain, ce serait un canard.
En sa qualité de canard, il aurait 0. Beaucoup trop de texte, aucune plume.
Là bah, c’est intéressant.
February 22, 2020
(click the image below to watch the video review)
I’m reviewing all of the Boss Fight Books releases, so subscribe to my YouTube channel to be sure you don’t miss future reviews.
I approach reading any video game book as a reader with three sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting personas. I read as a video game player, as a general reader, and as an armchair video game developer. The Venn diagram of those three personalities forms sort of a vortex in the center of which I comfortably reside, and especially so with the Boss Fight Books releases. I’m basically their ideal reader.
I say all this to qualify that I’m primed to like these books. And sometimes that means I may give more praise to a book than it might objectively deserve. But given my large swath of experience I’m also able to place the books in a proper context to help you, the potential reader, determine if these books are right for you.
With that said, Shovel Knight by David L. Craddock is really good. It fits within the sub-series of Boss Fight Books that seem to cater extra hard to armchair game developers. I really like this niche. In fact, this niche of stories by game developers for wannabe game developers could be an entire Boss Fight Books imprint, if, of course, there are other people like me who exist in that Venn diagram vortex that I mentioned above.
Craddock’s book is built upon extensive interviews with the small development team behind 2014’s extremely successful 8-bit inspired game Shovel Knight. Yacht Club, the development company, is a perfect bubbling cauldron of down-to-earth developers with some important professional history, indie-developer gumption, and willingness to chat at length about all of the ups and downs they’ve gone through, all of this coming together to form a witch’s brew concoction that I happily lap up.
At times this book feels like I’m chatting with the developers, especially when they talk about the conversations that inspired important character design, level design, and gameplay design decisions. This is one of a few books that should be in any burgeoning game developer's toolkit. There are plenty of how-to programming books and how-to art books out there, but few get into the heads of developers and artists as they make the important decisions that inform the code and the look of the games they’re making. Boss Fight Books’ own Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic by Alex Kane and Spelunky by Spelunky’s creator Derek Yu, are two books in the subset of Boss Fight Books that could make up the niche of indie dev stories imprint I briefly mentioned earlier. And some non-Boss Fight Books that could sit comfortably on that same shelf would be Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier, Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the Fight for Art and Soul in Video Games by Walt Williams, and Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner.
Early in the book we get an especially strong section that highlights this context around the pure boolean false true logic of game development. Here Craddock dedicates pages to discussions about creating the titular Shovel Knight character. Here’s a shovel-wielding knight, a character that seems illogical, but these discussions show us that the illogical character is actually quite grounded.
Because we’re hearing directly from the small development team, everyone on the team has something to say of their contributions to the game, which means much of what this book is about is the development of the game itself, rather than say any of the politics or publisher interests that can sometimes dominate a game’s development. Craddock spends a bit of time examining the emotional and financial pressures put upon the team, especially as the game’s launch date nears and the Kickstarter money runs very, very low. And the elation of success makes for a happy ending. But that stuff feels like an afterthought to me. It’s interesting, really interesting, actually, sure, but the real interest here is getting to hear about the conceptualization and creation of a video game that means so much to so many players who grew up playing the 8-bit games from which Shovel Knight took its inspiration.
This 8-bit inspiration is hammered on over and over and over again in the book, and rightly so. Yacht Club followed a singular aim to make Shovel Knight as close to the 8-bit games of their youth as they could. This mission is referenced so often that Craddock’s book, by way of the Yacht Club team’s conversations, feels almost like a Nintendo Entertainment System development primer at times. The team enforced upon themselves restrictions that aligned with original NES hardware restrictions, from allowing only certain color palettes to maintaining sprite size all in an effort to be as close to NES experience as possible. But the team wasn’t ambivalent to the obvious frustrations that would come with modern gamers playing an artificially limited experience. Gameplay programmer Ian Flood says of this approach: “We decided that anything that made it seem like the hardware was holding the game back, like a limitation, we would gleefully pass by it. [Shovel Knight] wasn’t an exercise in studying hardware limitations.” (pg 147)
David L. Craddock’s book is a must read for anyone who dabbles in, or is curious about dabbling in, game development. But it’s also a great read for any fan of 8-bit and modern indie games. The Yacht Club team’s passion and commitment to their vision is admirable and even contagious. In fact, just writing here makes me want to put in a few hours on my current game development project.
I’m reviewing all of the Boss Fight Books releases, so subscribe to my YouTube channel to be sure you don’t miss future reviews.
I approach reading any video game book as a reader with three sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting personas. I read as a video game player, as a general reader, and as an armchair video game developer. The Venn diagram of those three personalities forms sort of a vortex in the center of which I comfortably reside, and especially so with the Boss Fight Books releases. I’m basically their ideal reader.
I say all this to qualify that I’m primed to like these books. And sometimes that means I may give more praise to a book than it might objectively deserve. But given my large swath of experience I’m also able to place the books in a proper context to help you, the potential reader, determine if these books are right for you.
With that said, Shovel Knight by David L. Craddock is really good. It fits within the sub-series of Boss Fight Books that seem to cater extra hard to armchair game developers. I really like this niche. In fact, this niche of stories by game developers for wannabe game developers could be an entire Boss Fight Books imprint, if, of course, there are other people like me who exist in that Venn diagram vortex that I mentioned above.
Craddock’s book is built upon extensive interviews with the small development team behind 2014’s extremely successful 8-bit inspired game Shovel Knight. Yacht Club, the development company, is a perfect bubbling cauldron of down-to-earth developers with some important professional history, indie-developer gumption, and willingness to chat at length about all of the ups and downs they’ve gone through, all of this coming together to form a witch’s brew concoction that I happily lap up.
At times this book feels like I’m chatting with the developers, especially when they talk about the conversations that inspired important character design, level design, and gameplay design decisions. This is one of a few books that should be in any burgeoning game developer's toolkit. There are plenty of how-to programming books and how-to art books out there, but few get into the heads of developers and artists as they make the important decisions that inform the code and the look of the games they’re making. Boss Fight Books’ own Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic by Alex Kane and Spelunky by Spelunky’s creator Derek Yu, are two books in the subset of Boss Fight Books that could make up the niche of indie dev stories imprint I briefly mentioned earlier. And some non-Boss Fight Books that could sit comfortably on that same shelf would be Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier, Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the Fight for Art and Soul in Video Games by Walt Williams, and Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner.
Early in the book we get an especially strong section that highlights this context around the pure boolean false true logic of game development. Here Craddock dedicates pages to discussions about creating the titular Shovel Knight character. Here’s a shovel-wielding knight, a character that seems illogical, but these discussions show us that the illogical character is actually quite grounded.
Because we’re hearing directly from the small development team, everyone on the team has something to say of their contributions to the game, which means much of what this book is about is the development of the game itself, rather than say any of the politics or publisher interests that can sometimes dominate a game’s development. Craddock spends a bit of time examining the emotional and financial pressures put upon the team, especially as the game’s launch date nears and the Kickstarter money runs very, very low. And the elation of success makes for a happy ending. But that stuff feels like an afterthought to me. It’s interesting, really interesting, actually, sure, but the real interest here is getting to hear about the conceptualization and creation of a video game that means so much to so many players who grew up playing the 8-bit games from which Shovel Knight took its inspiration.
This 8-bit inspiration is hammered on over and over and over again in the book, and rightly so. Yacht Club followed a singular aim to make Shovel Knight as close to the 8-bit games of their youth as they could. This mission is referenced so often that Craddock’s book, by way of the Yacht Club team’s conversations, feels almost like a Nintendo Entertainment System development primer at times. The team enforced upon themselves restrictions that aligned with original NES hardware restrictions, from allowing only certain color palettes to maintaining sprite size all in an effort to be as close to NES experience as possible. But the team wasn’t ambivalent to the obvious frustrations that would come with modern gamers playing an artificially limited experience. Gameplay programmer Ian Flood says of this approach: “We decided that anything that made it seem like the hardware was holding the game back, like a limitation, we would gleefully pass by it. [Shovel Knight] wasn’t an exercise in studying hardware limitations.” (pg 147)
David L. Craddock’s book is a must read for anyone who dabbles in, or is curious about dabbling in, game development. But it’s also a great read for any fan of 8-bit and modern indie games. The Yacht Club team’s passion and commitment to their vision is admirable and even contagious. In fact, just writing here makes me want to put in a few hours on my current game development project.
February 17, 2019
A book taking you behind the scenes on game dev
If you liked blood sweat and pixels you’ll like this, it provides behind the scenes stories about the development of shovel knight
If you liked blood sweat and pixels you’ll like this, it provides behind the scenes stories about the development of shovel knight
March 24, 2020
It's fine but is more of a high-level oral history than anything. I don't know what I expected - the Boss Fight series is held in such high regard, particularly the Spelunky one. But in this case, theirs is a pretty generic startup story: quitting their jobs with a dream of doing Something Else, a successful Kickstarter, then having to buckle down and tighten their belts in the end because it's taking too long and they CAN'T DELIVER A RUSHED PRODUCT despite being out of money. You've heard it before about X, Y, Z different thing.
Some of the anecdotes about making the game have more to enjoy in them, though, such as the area about their overall design philosophy because it gave an interesting history on the limitations of NES games, how developers and Nintendo got around it, and how close Shovel Knight actually is to being playable on an NES and what compromises they took to make it still a modern game despite their limitations. In the end I think this taught me more about the design of Kirby and other NES games than it did Shovel Knight!
The other story I liked was about how they managed to get Manami Matsumae, the composer for the Mega Man games, to do some tracks for this as well. I always thought it was really cool to see her name there in the credits, but I had no idea that she'd more or less dropped off the map after she left Capcom.
But really the best result of this has been that it's urged me towards playing more Shovel Knight, which is always a good thing. Shovel Knight, y'all: it really is that bitch.
Some of the anecdotes about making the game have more to enjoy in them, though, such as the area about their overall design philosophy because it gave an interesting history on the limitations of NES games, how developers and Nintendo got around it, and how close Shovel Knight actually is to being playable on an NES and what compromises they took to make it still a modern game despite their limitations. In the end I think this taught me more about the design of Kirby and other NES games than it did Shovel Knight!
The other story I liked was about how they managed to get Manami Matsumae, the composer for the Mega Man games, to do some tracks for this as well. I always thought it was really cool to see her name there in the credits, but I had no idea that she'd more or less dropped off the map after she left Capcom.
But really the best result of this has been that it's urged me towards playing more Shovel Knight, which is always a good thing. Shovel Knight, y'all: it really is that bitch.
May 1, 2020
A clear and concise look at the design and development of one of the biggest modern indie games. The book has two different angles and one is more interesting than the other. As a story it's not particularly juicy - a group of friends quit the jobs they've lost interest in to follow a dream, take a risk on a big idea, endure some financial hardship, but then it all pays off when their idea is a major success. There's some nice anecdotes but for the most part it's stuff you've heard before, and the downs are brushed over compared to the ups.
The more appealing side is when you get insight into the design of Shovel Knight, learning how much thought and refinement has gone into even the smallest details of the game. Team members of varied disciplines are interviewed which gives you an all-encompassing look at the design, from level design to music composition to animation. There's enough behind-the-scenes detail to grab your attention and give you enough to learn from while not becoming too deep a dive that it becomes impenetrable to readers without technical knowledge of each area.
Very engaging and I managed to fly through it without even realising.
The more appealing side is when you get insight into the design of Shovel Knight, learning how much thought and refinement has gone into even the smallest details of the game. Team members of varied disciplines are interviewed which gives you an all-encompassing look at the design, from level design to music composition to animation. There's enough behind-the-scenes detail to grab your attention and give you enough to learn from while not becoming too deep a dive that it becomes impenetrable to readers without technical knowledge of each area.
Very engaging and I managed to fly through it without even realising.
June 23, 2025
Shovel Knight is one of my favorite games. It exudes personality, love, care, and attention for both seasoned gamers and newcomers. The story of Yacht Club Games embarking on their own journey to create not only a game but also a new studio in the early days of indie games is truly remarkable. It’s evident that the passion and dedication of a small, close-knit group shine through in every aspect of the game, even considering the limited budget. I’m inspired by their ability to establish a flat working group without focusing on specific positions. Instead, they collaborate, leveraging each other’s strengths and ensuring that everyone is aligned on every decision. I thoroughly enjoyed the rallying cry from those who supported Yacht Club Games, even those working at Nintendo who could sense the magic before the game’s release. This book beautifully encapsulates the passion and meticulous planning that go into making video games and captures why Shovel Knight is a masterclass in the video game pantheon.
June 7, 2020
Quick little read.
It gave a little bit of inside about the development of Shovel knight and its design philosophies.
I would had liked much more details or even lessons about theses philosophies and how to use them.
It gave a little bit of inside about the development of Shovel knight and its design philosophies.
I would had liked much more details or even lessons about theses philosophies and how to use them.
June 10, 2024
Este es definitivamente uno de los mejores libros sobre videojuegos que he leído. Una detallada narración de la historia de Yacht Club Games y el desarrollo de su primer juego sin dejar ningún aspecto sin analizar.
August 2, 2025
Quick-ish read, I know a lot of research and time went into expanding this from a novella form which given the story maybe I would have preferred. Pretty dry and uncompelling at points, slightly interesting anecdotes and insights but nothing surprising.
October 25, 2018
A detailed account of how Shovel Knight came to be and the struggles its developers have endured.
March 11, 2019
Love the game, but the book wasn't written that well.
September 30, 2020
I've never even played this game.
December 27, 2020
A really concise, steady look at the development of one of the great indie games.
February 14, 2021
Another great entry for an incredible game. If you love learning about all the behind-the-scenes of making a game then definitely check it out!
July 25, 2022
Como fan del juego me ha resultado una lectura amena e interesante respecto a cómo afrontaron el diseño y ciertas partes del desarrollo.
January 12, 2025
An interesting insight into a charming and classic game.
March 21, 2025
It was pretty good and included a lot of helpful information from the developers.
October 14, 2019
Un paseo interesante por la producción, de principio a fin, de uno de los videojuegos más ilusoriamente retro de la historia. Si quieres entender cómo se creó Shovel Knight, este libro es esencial. Si quieres aprender un poco de cómo se produce un videojuego y cómo un grupo de canallas alegres lo arriesga todo por amor al arte, al medio y a los pixeles, también este es tu libro. No le puse otra estrella porque eventualmente se vuelve repetitivo. Anecdótico pero no emocionante.
November 14, 2018
Not bad, but this book doesn't really add much that's new or interesting to the not insubstantial body of writing on Shovel Knight that's already out there. A lot of this book's content retreads the same ground covered by the Shovel Knight chapter in Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat and Pixels, and, frankly, Schreier is the better writer. While the book attempts to differentiate itself with a deep dive into the design philosophies underpinning Shovel Knight, the lack of any insight from Erin Pellon, one of Shovel Knight's five creators, is glaring. Yes, Pellon parted ways with Yacht Club Games years ago and so may not have been willing or able to make herself available for interviews regarding Shovel Knight; nevertheless, her absence is significant and the book feels lesser for it.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews