Shovel Knight (Boss Fight Books)

Very well written and enjoyable to read.

Just as described.

this is a good book. In some ways, it makes me both sad and is also somehow comforting.The book is basically a post-mortem recounting of how Shovel Knight and Yacht Club Games came to be. There's some history in there, and also some game-design discussion. It's nice to see a book dive into the history of a game developer and their genesis *while* the developer is still young and fresh, so the facts are straight and clear. So often these type of books are written way, way after the developer is lost to the wind and so getting clear information is difficult.The game design discussion sometimes feels a bit "Yes, of course." because Craddock has to explain certain concepts to a general audience that might not come from a videogame background, but it does go into some pretty in-depth rationale for how certain critical design decisions were made in parts that are useful.I say the book make me sad because, during the portion of the book where he explains the background of each team member it really feels like he's describing someone that was just like *me* except that I made different/wrong life choices at just a few critical junctures. The people at Yacht Club--though quite talented--aren't immortal gods of game design like Kojima or hyper talented artists like Joe Mad or Yatsunori Mitsuda. They're regular guys that just happened to have just the exact recipe of circumstances and determination to make a game together and be working in the industry. The comforting bit, I suppose, is the part where they're still just normal guys and perhaps if I stay determined I could some day stand amongst them.Again, it's not an expensive book and the chapters just fly by. Highly recommend!!

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.

I ordered this book promptly forgot that I did. I received it in the mail and, after a few days trying to figure out who sent it to me, I found that I had sent it to me. I can't remember why I ordered it. I don't like NES games. I don't like NES-style games. I didn't play Shovel Knight. (I watched a Lets Play, but that's about the size of it.)After a few days, I found there was a hole in my head the size of a book and I decided to read it. Well, I am surprised how much I liked it despite the caveats above. It's a compelling story told competently and confidently. You hear from (nearly) everyone involved in the production and not only do you read the nitty-gritty details of assets and code and whatnot, you also hear from the players behind the company that helped bring SK to the world. You also learn about the Yacht Club's founders from before they were Yacht Club. It's a very compelling read.If you must get the Kindle version, that's great, but I also hold a lot of regard for the physical package this book comes in. The size is small and typographic design is very, very good. If you buy physical books occasionally because you only want to devote space to beautiful books, this is one to buy. (All of Boss Fight's books are designed this way.)Read it. (Or don't! What am I? The person in charge of making you read something. You're going to miss out, though.)

Great read into the design and philosophy behind Shovel Knight - it's like a very long interview, with lots of flavour. Read this if you liked Masters of Doom, albeit through NES coloured lenses.

If you liked blood sweat and pixels you’ll like this, it provides behind the scenes stories about the development of shovel knight