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Yacht Club talks Shovel Knight level design, difficulty
A portion of a Maclife interview with Sean Velasco...
ML: How is the game structured? Can you tackle levels in any order? Is there any benefit to doing so?
SV: Shovel Knight travels the world via an overworld map similar to Bionic Commando or Super Mario Bros. 3. As you play the game and beat stages, more stages will unlock. You will generally have a few options of which stage to tackle next. Each stage is capped with an epic battle versus one of your arch foes, the Knights of the Order of No Quarter. Peppered everywhere will be mini-stages, random miniboss encounters, travelling merchants, and more. We’re aiming to make the world feel more organic and fleshed out than your typical stage-based game.
Tackling the stages in a different order can definitely help out. As Shovel Knight collects subweapon relics, he holds onto them permanently. So for instance, if you were having trouble in Propeller Knight’s airship stage, maybe you could get a relic elsewhere that would let you more easily cross those long gaps.
ML: What will the difficulty be like? Your previous games are known for being pretty insane in the difficulty department, and I’m not sure I want to hurl my USB controller across the room....
SV: We definitely want to avoid making Shovel Knight "Nintendo Hard." Luckily, we have the Kickstarter community to give us more feedback than we’ve ever had before. We want to make Shovel Knight somewhere around Mega Man 2 in difficulty; harder than Mega Man 2 on easy, but easier than Mega Man 2 on hard. To relieve our penchant for punishment, we have challenge mode, which will feature optional bite-sized challenges that can brain-bending or masochistic — or both!
Full interview here
ML: How is the game structured? Can you tackle levels in any order? Is there any benefit to doing so?
SV: Shovel Knight travels the world via an overworld map similar to Bionic Commando or Super Mario Bros. 3. As you play the game and beat stages, more stages will unlock. You will generally have a few options of which stage to tackle next. Each stage is capped with an epic battle versus one of your arch foes, the Knights of the Order of No Quarter. Peppered everywhere will be mini-stages, random miniboss encounters, travelling merchants, and more. We’re aiming to make the world feel more organic and fleshed out than your typical stage-based game.
Tackling the stages in a different order can definitely help out. As Shovel Knight collects subweapon relics, he holds onto them permanently. So for instance, if you were having trouble in Propeller Knight’s airship stage, maybe you could get a relic elsewhere that would let you more easily cross those long gaps.
ML: What will the difficulty be like? Your previous games are known for being pretty insane in the difficulty department, and I’m not sure I want to hurl my USB controller across the room....
SV: We definitely want to avoid making Shovel Knight "Nintendo Hard." Luckily, we have the Kickstarter community to give us more feedback than we’ve ever had before. We want to make Shovel Knight somewhere around Mega Man 2 in difficulty; harder than Mega Man 2 on easy, but easier than Mega Man 2 on hard. To relieve our penchant for punishment, we have challenge mode, which will feature optional bite-sized challenges that can brain-bending or masochistic — or both!