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Shovel Knight is getting a sequel in a ‘new dimension’

Shovel knight in full 3d.

By Jay Peters , a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

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Shovel Knight might be bouncing into 3D. Developer Yacht Club Games just announced a new mainline game in the hit series that started as a retro-inspired 2D platformer, and the studio says this new game will “launch Shovel Knight into an entirely new dimension of gaming,” according to a blog post .

If that wasn’t enough of a clue about the move to 3D, the Yacht Club Games’ Friday livestream celebrating the 10th anniversary of Shovel Knight featured an even more pointed hint: a 3D version of the Yacht Club Games logo.

The studio is staying mum about many specifics — there’s no release window — but did tease that “the game will bring electrifying action, richer mechanics, and all the timeless charm you expect from a Shovel Knight title.”

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While you wait for that new game, Yacht Club Games will have a lot of new things you can play. The studio also announced Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope DX , the “definitive edition” of the original Shovel Knight title that adds things like online multiplayer, stereoscopic 3D, a rewind power, in-game cheats, and the ability to play as 20 different Shovel Knight characters. Yacht Club Games says the game is “coming soon.” Shovel Knight Dig and Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon are also getting free DLC this summer.

The developer also shared new footage of Mina the Hollower , its upcoming game that looks to be heavily inspired by the Game Boy classic The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Mina also has a vague “coming soon” launch date, and I look forward to a more specific release window — the game looks fantastic.

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Why Shovel Knight was the right game at the right time

A new book looks at the making of Yacht Club Games’ debut title

by David L. Craddock

The following excerpt comes from the book Shovel Knight , available now from publisher Boss Fight Books . Based around interviews with development studio Yacht Club Games, the book looks at the making of the team’s debut game — Shovel Knight — and how the studio turned its Kickstarter success into one of the most critically acclaimed indie games to date.

Shovel Knight served as a vessel for the spirit of 8-bit gaming from the halcyon days when the NES reigned supreme in millions of living rooms. That spirit moved Dan Adelman. A graduate of Columbia University, Adelman spent four years at Microsoft helping to lay groundwork for the business side of the Windows publisher’s original Xbox console before joining Nintendo of America as head of digital content and development in November 2005. “When I joined Nintendo, there were already some plans for digitally distributing the classic NES, SNES and N64 titles via Virtual Console, but there was no strategy for how to expand digital distribution to include new games,” he said.

Adelman saw potential in courting smaller teams. At the time he joined Nintendo, however, he was something of an iconoclast. Rising costs made established studios such as Nintendo hesitant to branch out and experiment with bold, new designs. Adelman was keen to experiment. He connected with studios interested in publishing small-scale games on a small-scale budget. “WiiWare was the first digital distribution service I kicked off and ran at Nintendo,” he said. “Later iterations and improvements on the digital distribution service were DSiWare for the Nintendo DSi, and the 3DS and Wii U eShops.”

WiiWare, the flip side to Virtual Console’s golden oldies, was made up of brand-new games created by teams large and small. Published in 2008, World of Goo is a 2D puzzle game where players build contraptions by sticking pieces and parts together using wads of goop. Adelman saw the game’s potential and brought the four-person team into the Nintendo fold to release World of Goo on Wii. That same year, Capcom announced Mega Man 9 , which satisfied Nintendo’s goal of working with safe, known quantities.

Adelman persuaded the powers that be at Nintendo that they needed to approach independent developers differently than big-budget studios like Capcom. Many individuals inside Nintendo’s ranks saw little difference between Capcom and, later on, Yacht Club Games. They believed that all publishers should be held to the same standards, rates, and sales expectations. Adelman disagreed. To him, while all titles should hit certain quality markers, a four- or five-person team developing a game for a $15 to $20 price point shouldn’t be expected to hit the lofty sales goals — usually one million units sold or more — of big publishing houses that put out games with $50 or $60 price tags to justify development expenses in the tens or hundreds of millions. To Adelman, indies represented a sort of proving ground. Smaller teams could build games that cost exponentially less to fund, and that would catch the eye of players in the market for games at lower prices.

Nintendo became more willing to work with indie developers as support from monolithic third-party publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision turned their noses up at the Wii U’s underpowered hardware and stagnant sales. “A lot of third-party publisher support had dried up,” Adelman recalled of the Wii U’s lifespan between 2012 and 2017, “so the indie developers were keeping that system going for a while. I think many at Nintendo were grateful for that support.”

Adelman had met Yacht Club’s co-founders when he had entered into a publishing relationship to license WayForward’s games for distribution on WiiWare. “They were working on a very creative title called LIT , which was a survival horror puzzle game that used the Wii Remote as a flashlight,” Adelman said. “They were often a go-to partner, since they always delivered innovative and well-designed games.”

Shortly before kicking off their Kickstarter in early 2013, Yacht Club’s Sean Velasco phoned Adelman and brought him up to speed on their plans. “We were announcing this at the beginning of 2013,” Yacht Club’s David D’Angelo said. “PS4 and Xbox One hadn’t been announced yet, and we didn’t know if people would still be buying games for PS3 and Xbox 360. 3DS was at its height at the time, and we’d all got WiiUs and were excited about that.”

Adelman set up a meeting to see Shovel Knight . Although the game was still embryonic, he saw its potential right away. “I respond well to tight, precise controls, so I think that was the first thing I noticed,” he said. “It’s one of those things that’s underappreciated and so hard to get right, yet it makes all the difference. I also loved how authentically retro they were able to make the game, from the fonts they used to the color palette.”

Adelman demonstrated his support by clearing one major hurdle from Yacht Club’s road to publication. “We got our hands on Wii U and 3DS kits as loaners for a year or two, then we’d have to give them back,” Velasco said. “But during that time they were free. That was enormous for us because we had no money.”

“Since I was familiar with Sean from his WayForward days and knew he was a great game developer, I was able to expedite their approval process,” Adelman said. “But beyond that, there wasn’t much development support they needed from me. They knew what they were doing.”

Kickstarter success

Yacht Club’s Kickstarter went live on March 13, 2013, with a target of $75,000. With nine days to go before PAX, nervousness crept in. Their demo, a full stage from the game, remained unfinished. They had divided their time between generating content for the demo and putting together their crowdfunding campaign.

“It was crazy, man,” Velasco said. “It was a lot of work. I remember thinking, even a week before PAX, Well, maybe we won’t be able to get the demo done and we’ll just have our banner there, and some beanbags, and Super Mario 64 , and we’ll just play it and tell people about the game even though there’s no game to play. Just shoot the shit. Fortunately we were able to get it all done.”

Setting up their booth at PAX East, the guys watched as Shannon Hatakeda, a friend from WayForward who later joined Yacht Club Games as project manager, picked up a controller and began to play. The demo, finished in the nick of time, took place in King Knight’s stage, a gilded castle bedecked in lavish corridors, bottomless pits, and — in another nod to Mega Man — platforms that disappeared and reappeared at set intervals.

Velasco chewed his lip, watching to see where Hatakeda got stuck. At the end, she put down the controller and announced that Shovel Knight was fun. Really fun. The team let out a breath. The group’s confidence increased once the show got underway. Visitors streamed into their booth and raved about the game. Articles on websites such as Destructoid and Kotaku extolled its tight controls and throwback visuals.

“A big part of it was that we came out right around the time when Capcom was ignoring Mega Man,” D’Angelo said.

Three years had passed since Mega Man 10 ’s release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii. Long-time series producer and artist Keiji Inafune had been leading the design of Mega Man Universe , a sidescrolling game where players would be able to build levels and modify characters, before he left Capcom in October 2010. The company quietly cancelled the game early in 2011 for “various reasons.” Mega Man Legends 3 , the next installment in the 3D branch of the Blue Bomber’s family tree, had been announced in the fall of 2010, only to be shelved the next year, ostensibly due to low fan interest.

“Everyone was saying, ‘There will never be a Mega Man game again. I’m so sad,’” D’Angelo said. “And then here we come storming in with this game that feels much like a Mega Man experience.”

Yacht Club’s campaign oozed 8-bit charm and rekindled veteran players’ nostalgia. Rather than reveal all their information on day one, the team unwrapped their Kickstarter over the month-long period. Every week brought exciting reveals such as silhouettes of the Order of No Quarter, the bosses players would face in the game.

“What’s the coolest part of [a new] Mega Man [game]? The eight new Robot Masters,” Velasco said. He, like many players from the NES era, had fond childhood memories of daydreaming about the next game’s bosses. “What will they look like? What are their levels going to be like? We decided to do reveals of all of our knights throughout the Kickstarter campaign [because] that would be exciting.”

Nearly as much work goes into crafting a character’s silhouette as goes into creating the character. “When people talked about them, they could point to them and say, ‘That’s obviously an anchor sticking out of his arm. I wonder what he is,’” said Yacht Club artist Nick Wozniak, “or, ‘That tall, weird one that has a scythe — I’m sure he’s a reaper.’ Designing a knight is as much about their personality as how they fit with everybody else.”

Yacht Club gained support by targeting retro games from a specific time and platform. By the time Shovel Knight broke ground on Kickstarter, indie games boasting old-school trappings like pixel art, chiptune soundtracks and 2D platforming were sprouting like weeds. Shovel Knight stood apart from the pack. “First of all, it feels like an NES game,” Velasco said of why fans embraced Shovel Knight so quickly. “Games like Fez and Rogue Legacy look [and feel] like indie games. That’s a whole other thing.”

Fez and Rogue Legacy in particular look like they could have been published on other consoles, like Sony’s inaugural PlayStation. Their art style, while charming, casts a wide net, appealing to a general sort of nostalgia. Shovel Knight ’s art style evokes Nintendo’s 8-bit console in myriad ways. The trailer opens with Yacht Club Games spelled out in a pixelated font based on lettering that Japanese publisher Taito had used in dozens of classic coin-op and NES titles. Reading character dialogue in the Shovel Knight trailer transported players back to the days when blocky letters had unspooled across their equally blocky television sets.

“Nostalgia works well on Kickstarter because it’s something you can immediately understand,” said D’Angelo. “They still make Mario and Rayman [games], but there’s nothing new there. The idea of seeing a new IP where the character is the name of the game was a cool thing to see. Being able to draw on the feelings people had when they were eight years old worked for the Kickstarter [backers].”

Furthermore, Shovel Knight ’s Kickstarter served as an extension of the personalities of its creators. Yacht Club’s quintet were fun-loving and irreverent. They enjoyed satire, puns, alliterations and poking fun at the industry they loved. Along with premium goods such as a soundtrack and an art book for backers who pledged at or above a certain level, they offered an even more decadent prize: a bag of dirt. “We sold it for a hundred bucks,” said Woz, laughing. “We tried to figure out what this dirt would be because we were afraid of shipping bioorganic material across the world, so we didn’t want to use potting soil. We eventually got some generic, neutral sand, but we added stuff into it.”

Each bag’s “stuff” was unique to a particular knight from the Order of No Quarter. “We added tiny little bones for Specter Knight’s dirt,” Woz said. “He’s in a damned village, so we put in little bones and these skull things. We put that in a nice envelope, plus a little note from us describing the village, so you got a little taste of the world in real life. It sold out. We had to make more so people could keep buying it.”

Post-Kickstarter

Shovel Knight ’s campaign ended on April 13. Velasco and the others stared at their monitors through bleary eyes. Between Kickstarter pledges and PayPal donations, they had raised $328,682. They stared at one another. Shovel Knight was happening, and they had over 15,000 people to thank for it.

“To know that people were ready to get on board from the beginning was exciting,” D’Angelo said. “Normally when you make a game, it’s a secret for around 12 months, and it’s lonely and sad. To know that people are with you every step of the way was really fun.”

Once the Kickstarter funds came through, the team put their previously agreed-upon plans into motion. Each developer received their stipend. The rest was earmarked for future expenses. “We took a block of it and put it away so we couldn’t touch it because it was for Kickstarter rewards, or game codes [for press to review] t-shirts, and things like that,” Yacht Club’s Ian Flood said.

In May, Yacht Club traded Velasco’s cramped apartment for a proper work setting. “Once that money came in, we said, ‘OK, we want to lead real lives now. Let’s get a tiny, crappy office,’” said D’Angelo.

Bare, windowless walls bordered three rooms covered in green carpet. The main room — the largest, yet still cramped — became a bullpen for desks and equipment. A testing station took up an adjoining room. The third room was designated as a storage closet and, later, a repository for swag like posters and action figures. The walls didn’t stay bare for long. A Mega Man 9 poster went up on one. On another, a framed portrait of Star Wars creator George Lucas garbed in full military regalia watched over the team in the bullpen. Lucas’s portrait doubled as a shrine: Any time a business deal had to be conducted, they looked to Lucas, whom they dubbed the patron saint of shilling for his notorious ability to milk his intellectual properties dry.

The team gave little thought to décor. They had a game to make.

“We got emails as soon as we launched the Kickstarter that were like, ‘Why is this going to take so long? It looks like it’s already done,’” Velasco said. “The fact of the matter was that what you saw in the Kickstarter video and what you saw at PAX was all we had. That was everything we had.”

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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
• 1 Specter Knight
• 2 Shovel Knight
• 3 Body Swap Mode

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’ studio teases multiple upcoming games.

Yacht Club Games, the developer behind retro-platforming adventure Shovel Knight, teased a number of new projects in the works at the studio during its Yacht Club Games Presents event on Wednesday morning.

By Patrick Shanley

Patrick Shanley

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Yacht Club Games, the developer behind retro-platforming adventure Shovel Knight , teased a number of new projects in the works at the studio during its Yacht Club Games Presents event on Wednesday morning.

The prerecorded stream kicked off with an extended look at the upcoming title  Cyber-Shadow . Featuring the same throwback Nintendo Entertainment System aesthetic of the Shovel Knight series, Cyber-Shadow puts players in control of a sword-wielding character in a new platforming adventure. The game is set to launch sometime this fall.

Yacht Club also gave a small update on the development of the upcoming Shovel Knight spinoff Shovel Knight Dig , which takes inspiration from classic arcade title Dig Dug . Development is “going well,” according to the stream, and the title is expected to launch next year.

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Even less information was given about two new games also in development at the studio, neither of which were revealed (screens shown at developers’ desks were pixelated to obscure specific details. However, the Yacht Club team did mention the projects were “brand new IP” and will feature the studio’s “signature approach to game design, story and character.” The games are still a “way off,” but Yacht Club did offer one last tease, saying, “Please imagine what kind of games we’ll be crafting during 2020, the year of the rat.”

Finally, the team showed off a look at the upcoming Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon , a “rogue-like puzzle game hybrid,” featuring a new character, Puzzle Knight . The first demo of the game will be available on the show floor at Boston’s PAX East convention this weekend. The game does not have a planned release date.

Formed in 2011, Yacht Club Games is an independent video game studio in Los Angeles. Its first game, Shovel Knight , debuted in 2014 after a successful Kickstarter campaign aided in funding for development. The game received widespread critical acclaim and spawned three spinoffs focusing on various characters’ adventures in the universe, collected together in the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove title. In 2019, the collection topped 2.5 million copies sold.

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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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Yacht Club Games bids farewell to Shovel Knight

COO James Chan on how unexpected success led to an unexpected five year dev cycle, and the studio's Blizzard-esque approach to what comes next

As a studio, Yacht Club Games is remarkable not just for its success, but also its transparency. Search our archives and you'll find multiple news stories based on the kind of data that most developers guard like a vial of magic potion. That was true back in 2014 , when its first (and still only) IP Shovel Knight had been on the market for a month, and it has stayed true in the five years that have passed since.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom, Yacht Club COO James Chan says that the reason for the regular, minutely detailed blog posts on costs and marketing and sales has always been the same. Game development is "aspirational," and the industry has never been transparent enough to really help developers just starting out.

"It's a little bit voodoo magic and a little bit rockstar, all at the same time," Chan says. "People love playing games -- it can be the core of their personality -- but making games always seems like a magical thing that you don't know how to do.

"We love to share information because we believe in it... It's not only going to make us better as an industry, but also be inspirational to others. 'They're sharing everything, and now it's my turn to try.'"

"We love to share information because we believe in it... It's going to make us better as an industry"

A side benefit of that consistently open philosophy is the opportunity to compare then with now. In its first info dump after Shovel Knight's launch, Yacht Club planned to fund a team of five people for two years, based on lifetime sales of 150,000 units. Let's just say it beat that target, and then some.

"It went a lot better than that, yeah," Chan says, smiling. "As of last month it was 2.65 million, and we're now 17 people. I think the place will probably stay quite small for the foreseeable future. We try to maintain a flat corporate structure, which makes expansion a little bit difficult, but that's our DNA as a company."

Yacht Club far exceeded its own projected sales and headcount, but the other key metric here is time. At one point, the studio had only planned for two years into its own future, but the Shovel Knight Kickstarter campaign launched in March 2013, and Chan is at Gamescom 2019 pushing more content -- specifically King of Cards and Showdown -- for the same basic product. Yacht Club, it seems, is still working through the promises it made to those very early backers.

"Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals," Chan says. "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.

"[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, and 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?'"

Chan is referring to the company's next game, of course, but it is also using the success and stability that Shovel Knight created to make what is an increasingly familiar move: third-party publishing. In fact, Yacht Club published Inti Creates' Gunvolt Striker Pack in the US back in 2016, but it proved to be a step too far, too soon at that point. Chan only joined the company the following year, and his experience allowed the founders to focus on making games while he assessed and shaped the business -- publishing strategy included.

"Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals"

"It was time the development team just didn't have." Chan says. "We were already apologetic about how long it was taking to finish King of Cards, so I was the one who could actually push that forward.

"Our publishing philosophy, a lot of it is sharing knowledge. We're not 'Here's a bunch of money, go make your game, we'll QA it and send it out.' We care a lot about the developer. We show them our development tools, which they might want to make for themselves, and then they own their process better.

"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."

With so many indie publishers scouting for product, any new player in the market needs to offer something distinct to potential partners. With Yacht Club, it's a very close, very open relationship in which all of the knowledge it accumulated selling 2.65 million units of Shovel Knight is there for the taking. This has its limits, Chan explains, specifically the number of third-party games it's possible for the company to handle, given the effort and time it wants to put in to each one.

"It's probably a more expensive form of publishing than anyone else is doing," Chan says. "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."

In terms of both publishing and internal development, Nintendo platforms will remain a key focus for Yacht Club Games. Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of Shovel Knight's early success was just how well it performed on the Wii U, a struggling platform that was close to being written off at the time. This was widely seen as evidence that Yacht Club knew exactly where to find the best audience for its product, and the same was true when it launched to great success on the Switch in 2018.

"The Switch is still a really good platform for us. It's where gamers that speak our language are"

"It was so early that we benefited from people having nothing else to buy," Chan adds, noting that Shovel Knight was among the first wave of third-party titles on both Wii U and Switch. "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."

This will be the case with the first game to launch under Yacht Club's renewed publishing strategy: Cyber Shadow, from the Finnish indie developer Mechanical Head Studios. According to Chan, everyone at the company had a say in which game was selected, and Cyber Shadow was deemed the best fit for Yacht Club's brand identity, what it looks for in a partner, and its expectations of success. Every box was ticked.

It also fits into what Yacht Club considers its own style; not a maker of "retro platformers," which Chan believes is often the impression people have due to Shovel Knight, but a studio dedicated to the more broad area of "classic gaming."

"You can have totally modern art," Chan says, "but as long as the experience speaks to the classic gamer then we think that's okay."

The most obvious lingering mystery, then, is exactly what Yacht Club itself will make next. Chan is insistent that the team has not yet decided, preferring to draw a line under Shovel Knight before it makes any serious commitment to a new idea. That kind of time is a luxury that 2.65 million sales provides, and while Chan is aware that the line between taking your time and wasting your money can be difficult to see, he cites Blizzard Entertainment as a role model in how Yacht Club is approaching the careful development of its next game.

"If it's not good," he says, "we don't release it."

Read this next

• Shovel Knight earns more revenue from Switch sales than any other platform
• Shovel Knight passes 1.2m sales, with 200k from retail
• Square Enix says sales of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16 "did not meet expectations"

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Table 1: Project-level location details

The map below shows the exact location of the coal mine:

Project Details

Table 2: project status.

Table 3: Operation details

Table 4: Coal resources and destination

Table 5: Ownership and parent company

Expansion/Extension

Table 6: project status.

Note: The above section was automatically generated and is based on data from the GEM April 2024 Global Coal Mine Tracker dataset.

The Kiyzassky coal mine is operated by SibAnthracite, which was acquired by A-Property in 2021. [6] Following the completion of the sale transaction, in 2022 A-Property consolidated the coal assets of Sibanthracite Group and A-Property under the new management company Elga-Sibanthracite (ELSI). [7]

Vostok Coal used to manage the mine [5] , but its role after the acquisition by A-Property is not clear.

Kiyzassky received its first license in April 2012 and first transported coal from the mine in March 2014. [5] The mine was commissioned in record-breaking time. It took only two years from granting the licence in April 2012 till the commencement of its commercial operation. [8]

The mine operates the pits Urelgolsky and Urelgolsky 5-6. In 2018 it produced 9.3 million tonnes, 2020 production was much lower at 5.7 million tonnes. [9] In 2022, production reached 8.765 million tonnes. [10]

Coal is transported from Kiyzassky mine by train. The mine has its own infrastructure, including a 30 km train-line. In 2014 VosktokCoal opened Uglepogruzochnaya railway station and a loading facility. [5]

The mine sells coal on the domestic and foreign markets in Western Europe and Asia-Pacific. As of 2020, about 50% of products were exported. [5]

An expansion of the mine has been proposed with increases in capacity at Uregolsky and Uregolsky 5-6 sites up to 13 million tonnes in total, by 2028. The expansion is included in Russia's 'Programme for Coal Industry Development up to 2035', released in June 2020. [11] The Programme stated that construction permit and the environmental permits were issued. In September 2022, the governor of Kuzbass said that new mine projects are on hold due to infrastructure restrictions of coal exports through the Eastern route of Russian Railways, only the projects that are nearing completion are being finished. [12] Given this announcement and no news on the project's progress, this expansion was considered Shelved, as of October 2022.

In December 2022, the company stated that it has acquired four new excavators that will allow to increase production at Kiyazassky and the Vostochny coal mine . [10] In January 2023, Elga-Sibanthracite also made statements that it aims to increase its total production by 100 million tonnes by 2025, up from 45 million tonnes in 2022. [13] Given these updates, the expansion's status was revised to Proposed in July 2023.

Environmental issues

This mine lies in a heavily mined area, which was once intact taiga forest. The indigenous Shor people live in this region. Local people say that the coal mines which surround their village, including Kiyzassky, pollute the water, making it undrinkable. The mines produce dust which blows off the waste tips and into the rivers. The animals have fled the area, leaving the Shor people heavily reliant on bought goods, rather than foraging and hunting their own food and medicines, as they have done in living memory. [14]

• Owner: Razrez Kiyzassky LLC
• Parent: A-Property
• Location: 10km from the village Chuvashka, Novokuznetsky District, Kemerovo Oblast, Russia
• GPS Coordinates: 53.570833, 87.667500 (exact)
• Status: Operating
• Production Capacity: 9.3 million tonnes (2018) [5] , 5.7 million tonnes (2020) [9] , 8.765 million tonnes (2022) [10]
• Total Resource:
• Mineable Reserves: 77 million tonnes [15] (2021, JORC)
• Coal type: Bituminous (Thermal and Met)
• Mine Type: Surface
• Start Year: 2012
• Source of Financing:

Expansion details

• Status: Proposed
• Production Capacity: An increase of 3.7 Mtpa to 13 Mtpa [11]
• Mineable Reserves:
• Start Year: 2028 [11]

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Russian Company OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII"

Brief profile.

active Commercial

Facts to Consider

6 more firms are registered at the address of the organization.

There is a foreign legal entity among the founders.

show 1 more significant fact

The organization has an auditor's opinion.

The organization holds 10 licenses.

show 1 more positive fact

Complete Profile

• 1. General Information
• 2. Registration in the Russian Federation
• 3. Company's Activities
• 4. Legal Address
• 5. Owners, Founders of the Entity
• 6. OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" CEO
• 7. Entities Founded by Company
• 8. Company Finance
• 9. Timeline of key events
• 10. Latest Changes in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (USRLE)

General Information

Full name of the organization: OBSHCHESTVO S OGRANICHENNOI OTVETSTVENNOSTIU "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII"

TIN: 4214033674

KPP: 421401001

PSRN: 1114214001857

Location: 652840, Kemerovo Oblast, Myski, ul. Sovetskaia, zd. 50

Line of business: Coal mining, with the exception of anthracite, coking coal and brown coal, open pit (OKVED code 05.10.13)

Organization status: Commercial, active

Form of incorporation: Limited liability companies (code 12300 according to OKOPF)

Registration in the Russian Federation

The average age of legal entities for the type of activity 05.10.13 "Coal mining, with the exception of anthracite, coking coal and brown coal, open pit" is 13 years. The age of this organization is approximately equal to the industry average.

The tax authority where the legal entity is registered: Mezhraionnaia inspektsiia Federalnoi nalogovoi sluzhby № 8 po Kemerovskoi oblasti - Kuzbassu (inspection code – 4214).

Registration with the Pension Fund: registration number 052012007253 dated 28 November 2011.

Registration with the Social Insurance Fund: registration number 420900491042091 dated 28 November 2011.

Company's Activities

The main activity of the organization is Coal mining, with the exception of anthracite, coking coal and brown coal, open pit (OKVED code 05.10.13).

Additionally, the organization listed the following activities:

OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" holds licenses entitling to carry out the following activities:

The organization is included in the Roskomnadzor registry as a personal data processing operator .

Legal Address

OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" is registered at 652840, Kemerovo Oblast, Myski, ul. Sovetskaia, zd. 50. ( show on a map )

The following organizations are also registered at this address:

• OOO "KATES"

The reason may be that the address’s accuracy wasn’t ascertained after the registration. Otherwise the address can be recognized as an address of mass legal entities registration.

Owners, Founders of the Entity

The founders of OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" are

Below are the former founders:

Subject to the entire chain of the current founders, the list of OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" ultimate founders is as follows:

OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" CEO

• (general manager from 01/14/2019 until 09/20/2019 * )
• (general manager from 01/16/2013 until 01/14/2019 * )

Management (the functions of the sole executive body) since 20 September 2019 is performed by the managing organization "MANAGEMENT COMPANY "RAZREZ KIYZASSKY" LLC .

Entities Founded by Company

OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" is not listed as a founder in any Russian legal entities.

Company Finance

The Authorized capital of OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" is 8.5 million RUB. This is significantly higher than the minimum authorized capital established by law for LTD (10 thousand RUB).

In 2023, the organization received the revenue of 65.3 billion RUB, which is 4 billion RUB, or by 6.5 %, more than a year ago.

As of December 31, 2023, the organization's total assets were 62.2 billion RUB This is 12 billion RUB (by 23.9 %) more than a year earlier.

The net assets of OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII" as of 12/31/2023 totaled 55.9 billion RUB.

The OOO "RAZREZ KIIZASSKII"’s operation in 2023 resulted in the profit of 16.7 billion RUB. This is by 9 % less than in 2022.

The organization is not subject to special taxation regimes (operates under a common regime).

The organization had no tax arrears as of 05/10/2024.

Timeline of key events

• is no longer listed as the head in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
• Managing organization – "MANAGEMENT COMPANY "RAZREZ KIYZASSKY" LLC .
• The new founder – KHILLESTRATO INVESTMENTS LIMITED (Republic of Cyprus).
• The new founder – ELEMDABLIU SHIPPING SERVISES LIMITED (Republic of Cyprus).

Latest Changes in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (USRLE)

• 07/29/2024 . Change of information about a legal entity contained in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
• 05/14/2024 . Change of information about a legal entity contained in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
• 03/18/2024 . Change of information about a legal entity contained in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
• 02/01/2024 . Changes to the information contained in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities in connection with the renaming (resubordination) of address objects.
• 03/30/2023 . Change of information about a legal entity contained in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
• 09/02/2022 . Entering information about the limitation of the license.

* The date of change in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities is shown (may be different from the actual date).

The data presented on this page have been obtained from official sources: the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (USRLE), the State Information Resource for Financial Statements, the website of the Federal Tax Service (FTS), the Ministry of Finance and the Federal State Statistics Service.

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