David D'Angelo

Yacht Club borrowed an under-used move and tuned it for usability. The shovel drop comes from the downward thrust in Zelda 2, one of Sean Velasco's favourite NES moves, which that game under-used. The team removed the need to hold down and made the shovel's collision wide.

Not holding down keeps the thumb free to steer in mid-air, and the wide hitbox forgives near misses. DuckTales' pogo-jump and the Mario ground-pound were other inspirations.

One action serves both combat and platforming. The shovel drop crushes enemies and bounces Shovel Knight upward, with bounce height depending on what he hit. It works as a weapon and a traversal tool at once.

The bounce turns Zelda 2's high and low combat into side-on and top-down combat. Gold Armor blocks at the front and above, much like Iron Knuckle in Zelda 2, so the player has to be quick.

The team built enemies and level elements around the signature move. A huge number of enemies and level elements in the campaign are made to be bounced on or hit from above. They include magic books, giant gears, bouncy beetles, floating bushes, sea snakes, jellyfish, massive cannonballs and an angry angler fish.

This gives the move constant purpose and makes the world feel made for the hero.

Plague Knight puts the mastery in his controls because his levels were reused. His stages are nearly Shovel Knight's, so the fun had to come from the character's mobility. A skilled player clears stages in half the time Shovel Knight takes.

The characters were first planned as same-level variants, like the robot masters in Mega Man: Powered Up. Velasco: "The complexity of the character is where the fun comes from as opposed to the complexity of the environment, which was already a known quantity."

Fixed rules make a steep, risky move masterable. The bomb burst follows the same trajectory every time, control returns near the end, and a neutral jump cancels it. Throwing bombs slows the fall and adds slight lift.

You hold attack to charge, then release to launch halfway across the screen. A second burst can save you, but the charge takes almost a second.

Specter Knight gets Plague Knight's reach but feels controllable. The dash slash only works near slashable objects, and a line shows direction and roughly where you will land. It removes control for about as long as the burst does.

Specter has a long jump hang time and falls slowly after dashing, so he can steer to a landing. An automatic wall run can rescue a missed landing, while Plague Knight plummets after his burst.

New level layouts guide players into the move's rhythm. Specter Knight's stages lay out enemies in readable sequences, such as three in a row, so the player sees what to do and executes. Plague Knight's reused levels left gaps with no clear answer to where to land.

Velasco: "When you put a platform somewhere people go to stand on it." The team justified the new layouts by planning to reuse them for King Knight.

Each hero was designed as an answer to the one before. Players found Plague Knight hard to control, so Specter Knight was built to make it easy to feel cool. Each character shifts where the difficulty of mastery sits.

Velasco and D'Angelo put it as "Every game is an answer to the previous one."

King Knight's kit was shaped by a level reuse plan that never happened. The plan to recycle Specter Knight's levels drove his moves, but he ended up with an all-new set of stages. His shoulder bash (from Wario) launches him into a spin (from Super Mario World), and landing mid-spin restores the bash.

The chain makes players alternate between horizontal and vertical action. A missed bash can be disastrous, so the move carries high commitment.

D'Angelo's team cut Mario-style momentum because it made the bash too scary. The team had planned momentum, a world map and short courses to match Mario. Momentum on top of the bash did not work.

The bash already sends him "a million miles", and D'Angelo's verdict on adding momentum was "Whoa! Calm down!"

King Knight's hidden bash state is hard to read. His spin looks identical whether or not the bash is available, so players must work it out. Celeste changes Madeline's hair colour and Downwell flashes the character to show the same kind of state.

The team had a million discussions about adding an indicator, and chose to let players feel the state, as with the unseen dash count in Mega Man X.

Where state is hidden, the rules lean in the player's favour. Getting hit gives King Knight a free bash, so players who can't tell the state are still protected.

Taking control from the player steepens the learning curve. The bomb burst and the shoulder bash lock the hero into committed animations, so players must plan ahead. Shovel Knight keeps full control during the drop, falls at the same speed as a jump, and can cancel with an attack.

Complexity lives either in the moveset or in the level layout. In a blank room Shovel Knight can barely do anything, while Plague Knight reaches almost every corner. Simple controls leave complexity to the level, and complex controls carry it themselves.

Level-driven heroes flow well but can feel prefabricated and puzzle-like. Richer move-sets may suit speedrunning and mastery better.

Give players a way out of a bad move. Shovel Knight over a pit is mostly stuck. Plague Knight bursts or throws bombs out of danger, Specter runs up walls, and King bashes.