Get into the heads of the developers behind Shovel Knight! A review of David L. Craddock’s book
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I just finished reading Shovel Knight by David L. Craddock, the 19th book in the Boss Fight Books series, and I’ve got some thoughts.
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 Shovel Knight 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.
Mentioned
- Boss Fight Books review playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMKbK8vtuoicyVRhGfap2QIj5R5mWJioY
- Shovel Knight from Boss Fight Books: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/shovel-knight-by-david-l-craddock
- David L. Craddock on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidlcraddock
Music Credits
Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3454-bossa-antigua
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Pump by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4252-pump
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
