When Yacht Club Games decided to style Shovel Knight after the NES games that inspired it, they took that project seriously. Shovel Knight can t fill the screen with 1000 bullets or radically switch up how it plays. It has to stay true to its inheritance, else, as programmer and co-designer David D Angelo tells me, It d stand out as bizarre.
So its bosses naturally follow classic rules, too, including its final one, the Enchantress. Here, Yacht Club faced the challenge of producing a fight with the same restriction of four attacks and 20 hit points as all the other bosses, while also acting as a striking culmination of the adventure. But the real challenge began when they went back to redesign her another three times, once for each of the game s expansions. And now the project is finally done, these four riffs on the same battle are a chance to witness a studio jamming on and exploring the nooks and crannies of its design. (more…)