All Articles: Shovel Knight Dig

Shovel Knight gets upgraded to 16-bit as Yacht Club Games announces Shovel Knight Dig

Shovel Knight is back! After ceding the spotlight to three members of The Order of No Quarter in Plague of Shadows, Specter of Torment, and King of Cards, the blade-wielding hero is returning in a full-fledged new sequel.

Shovel Knight Dig picks up right where the first game leaves off, as Shovel Knight chases the diabolical Drill Knight down underground in an SNES-styled game that features “meticulously crafted” levels stitched together using procedural generation, so every playthrough will be slightly different. Yacht Club has more details about Shovel Knight Dig, which has been in development for “more than a year,” at their official website:

When Drill Knight and his dastardly digging crew blast apart Shovel Knight’s peaceful campsite and steal his loot, he grabs his trusty Shovel Blade and starts tunnelling after them! Meet new friends and foes, visit strange lands, and outfit yourself in your quest to keep the entire land from collapsing underfoot! Jump, slash, and dig your way down an ever-changing chasm of mystery in Shovel Knight Dig, an all-new Shovel Knight adventure!

Shovel Knight Dig will feature new Knights to battle (including the aforementioned Drill Knight and the mushroom-themed Spore Knight) and other new characters to interact with. But don’t worry, plenty of familiar faces can be found in the Announcement Trailer, which has been embedded above.

Shovel Knight Dig is being co-developed by Yacht Club Games and Nitrome, with Jake Kaufman once again providing the soundtrack. The game still has “quite a ways to go,” so we have no clue when it’ll be released, but we do know that it’s in the works for the PS4 and Switch (and likely the PC and Xbox One as well).

Attendees at this weekend’s PAX West convention will be able to test out Shovel Knight Dig for the first time at Yacht Club’s booth.

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Yacht Club Games is asking their fans to help choose their next project

yachtclubgames-logoYacht Club Games is busy adding King Knight and Specter Knight to Shovel Knight, but the team is also brainstorming their next project… and they need your help.

Listing a few specific titles (a single-player Shovel Knight 2, a Shovel Knight & Shield Knight multiplayer platformer) alongside a number of different gameplay styles in an online poll, the developer wants their fans to help them decide where they should focus their energy in the future.

In a previous life, many of Yacht Club’s developers worked for WayForward, and they actually have real experience with many of these genres. The team tackled “A Contra” in 2007 when they partnered with Konami to create Contra 4. They also developed “A Metroid” and “A Mario” after working on 2011’s Aliens: Infestation and the long-running Shantae series (which began in 2002).

Yacht Club isn’t sharing the results of the survey just yet, but the company’s “Captain,” Sean Velasco, is happily telling everyone on Twitter that Shovel Knight 64 (a Shovel Knight done in the blocky polygonal style of N64-era games) is “a lock.” This isn’t the first time that Velasco has joked about Shovel Knight 64, and Nintendo themselves even hinted at a second game in the series back in 2015.

I’m on board for whatever Yacht Club is up to next, but I’d really like to see what Shovel Kart looks like.

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