GameSpot
The Surprising Factors That Made Mina The Hollower A Game Of The Year Contender
Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club Games' long-awaited follow-up to Shovel Knight, has been released to critical acclaim. The retro-inspired hit currently stands as the top-rated game of the year on Metacritic. This came after a sometimes tumultuous development cycle including delays and downsizing for the studio. We spoke with David D'Angelo, the lead programmer for Mina the Hollower, about the game's journey to release, its surprising inspirations, and how it approaches difficulty for a top-down souls-like.
GameSpot: What's been the mood at the studio since reviews started to roll in?
David D'Angelo (Programmer, Yacht Club Games): I mean just everyone's very overwhelmed, very excited and happy. And the game, it's been six years we've been working on it. And we had a reviewer Discord that some reviewers and previewers were participating in and most of the chat was about, "I got lost here," "I got lost here," "I can't find this item," "I can't do this. Oh, are you serious? I have to do this in the game?" That kind of stuff. And when you're reading that all in a row, it's just like, "Oh, we're doomed."
You were starting to get alarmed.
D'Angelo: Yes. "We're in big trouble." It's like we're keeping in our mind, "Our friends and family playtested it, they got lost too. It's like fun getting lost. It's fun getting lost, right?" But you never know. You never know how people are actually going to take it.
Another major part of it is just we didn't know what parts of the game you would even engage with because so much of it's open and so much of it's optional. I would say maybe the average person is playing the game and getting 50-70% of the item completion, which, I mean, it's just very low compared to what we're used to with something like Shovel Knight. So we expected it would be very ... Oh, if you're playing it in a community like that with three other people, it'll be a lot more engaging because you'll be like, "I saw this and did you see that?" "No, I've got to go do that. Oh, that's really cool." But we were a little worried that a reviewer would be siloed off and, "Oh, I'm just playing. I got stuck here and I never asked anyone, my friends for help," or whatever.
Yeah, and that's a mainstay of this genre. The souls-like genre, part of it is the community aspect, playing alongside other people and sort of sharing things.
D'Angelo: Yeah, definitely. When I played the original Demon's Souls, I was like, "Oh my God, they made 3D Zelda. The old Zeldas they brought into 3D, this is crazy." I mean, I had very much that experience. And when I played old Zeldas, I had that experience. I played the original Zelda and Link to the Past. I remember getting the Moon Pearl and being like, "What the hell is this? How do I use this mirror? Where do I go?" And it's like you figure it out with your friends and that's part of the joy of it is just unraveling the quirks of it.
That's interesting. I've never gotten into the Souls games, but I didn't think of them as having a continuum of design with Zelda. And it seems like you very much had that in mind, and Mina is marrying those in a much more explicit way.
D'Angelo: Yeah. I mean, as a studio, I'm not alone in that sentiment. Dark Souls is very different and I could see how you would completely bounce off those games and love Zelda games. But I think the same way, we are big lovers of Zelda II [The Adventure of Link] and most of the world is not, right? And I think the line there is even more clear because it's actually an RPG where you're leveling up. And just the first place you have to go on Zelda II is a room that's dark that you can't see anything. It's just obtuse in the same way a Souls game is.
Mina the Hollower
There's been this long debate raging in the Soul's genre like, "No, the difficulty is the difficulty and you either get good or you bounce off, who cares?" Mina lets you turn on Modifiers and that's much more player-friendly. You can really fine tune it, like, "I'm struggling with this particular aspect. I'm really having a problem with pits. So I need something to help with pits."
So what side do you come down on in the whole Souls debate and how did that inform the choice to put in Modifiers, and also the variety of Modifiers?
D'Angelo: The whole story of modifiers is that in Shovel Knight we promised 'secrets only you would know' in our Kickstarter as one of the backer tiers. And we didn't know what that would be. And we got 300 people to back it and we're like, "Oh geez, oh God, we've got to come up with 300 secrets. How do we even come up with 300 secrets?"
So we decided to do old-school Game Genie-style cheats in the game that you would activate with the file select. And we put that in and it ended up leaking the first day, everyone found them and it was a joy to see people falling in love with cheat codes again. But the sort of bummer of it is that they are cheat codes and you can't turn them on, that you could only have one of them on at a time.
Shovel Knight
So when we did Mina, we're like, "How about we just make a menu with it and we'll do the same idea, we'll have Genie-style cheats, but you can turn on whatever you want, and that's fun." It felt like a natural extension of what we were making, which is like, "Now we're making an RPG where you can go anywhere and you could level up your character to be super overpowered if you want. And you can buy all this equipment and sort of cheat the game a little bit, or you can do the opposite. We have a pawn shop in the game and you could sell all your equipment. You could play with one health if you want."
In the game, it's already built to be like you're modifying the experience in the game. And so it didn't feel incongruent with that. So that's why we did it.
But I guess in terms of the overarching "get good" conversation, we are definitely the kind of people that, I guess, we don't care. We don't take it that seriously. Have fun with the game however you want to have fun with it. It's in your hands. I think it's sort of a weird argument that people make because, for example, when Silksong came out, which has a very similar ethos, people just download mods for the game. They'll end up doing that kind of thing anyway. They'll make it their own kind of experience. At the end of the day, why subject people to that experience, which is like, "Oh, I can't play this game, but I really want to, so I'm going to go download some mods on the internet and install them." It feels weird that you would, as a developer, want that to be the intended experience.
But with all that said, I think it's cool that a Souls game is like, "This is what it is and this is what we want it to be. And if you don't like it, that's okay." The same way there's novels that are just way more complex and full of language that you need to have a good understanding of the English language to be able to read. And I mean, I guess for that comparison, we're more like Little Women is a complex novel that an adult needs to read, but we're the kind of people that would make the Little Women children's book and you can read that and you can hopefully get the same joy out of it. And then when you grow up, you can read the Little Women's adult novel version and you can get another kind of joy out of that too.
The approach I recommended is: You want to see what's in this game, so if part of it is tripping you up, then turn on whatever you need to be able to see that stuff.
D'Angelo: Yeah, one of the goals of the games we're making in general is we want to make a game you love but we also want to make games that make you love games as a concept. There's a reason our games are retro-style games. It's because the best thing that we hear when people play something like Shovel Knight is like, "Oh, I went into my dad's garage and he had an NES and I dug it out and I started playing those games. Because before I didn't see why you would play it, but now I see why you would go and try those games out." And the goal is, we're teaching you the language of how to maybe play those games or what part of those games are appealing or fun or cool that you might stomach something that you wouldn't normally do. And I mean, I think the modifiers are just a stepping stone to get there, right?
Between Shovel Knight and Mina, you're going for a certain time and place in gaming history. It's inspired by 8-bit, it's crunchy and lo-fi. So what is it about the limitations of that time period that appeals to you?
D'Angelo: For me, for Game Boy, I love how they're trying to just build a huge thing into this tiny little piece of hardware, tiny screen, the fact that it's black and white--or Game Boy Color is a limited color palette. If you think about the games that were big at that era, it's like Pokemon, right? In the other consoles, they finally were breaking out into huge games. Your Final Fantasys were getting enormous, hundreds of hours of playtime, but on Game Boy, that's hard to accomplish, but they still were doing it. Pokemon could have been a game with 30 Pokemon in it, but it has more than a hundred Pokemon. It's crazy.
Which was mind-blowing.
D'Angelo: It's mind blowing! Even getting a hundred unique graphics on a Game Boy is a challenge, so we're going to pack this big experience into this tiny little package. I think it's just such an amazing feeling. So yeah, I really love that. And I mean, I just love just any retro thing--the game design, what is good and bad is not set in stone. So they're trying so many different weird ideas.
For example, Mina starts with a big boss fight, because Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy had a huge boss fight. When you started that game, you're a slave that is thrown into a gladiator fight [with] a huge monster. And it's just like what an insane way to start a game. It's like you just have no sense of what's going on and you're immediately thrown into like, "I'm fighting this giant thing on a Game Boy." And it just feels like nowadays they'd be like, "You can't do that. You have to teach the player how to play. They have to feel comfortable. They can't go into a situation where they don't know how to use the weapon and they don't know how to do this." So they have weird and interesting ideas that are fun for us to pull from and figure out how to make them work a little better.
Mina the Hollower
Mina has some pretty severe difficulty spikes, and we talked about having modifiers as a way to just mitigate that. But how worried were you about alienating a Zelda fan who comes to this thinking, "Oh, it's like a Zelda game"?
D'Angelo: Yeah, there's a few components of it. The biggest thing we were worried about is that in a lot of ways it's not like a Zelda game in that you're not getting the Hookshot to cross the pit. One of the very common things that people ran into in our playtesting and that we had to solve, which is basically people would get to the water area in the game and they would say, "I can't go here. I don't have the flippers." The way we solved that was we made you get locked in that area so you eventually had to figure out that it was the burrowing mechanic to get you through the water.
But that kind of thing, it's that kind of ethos that you can go anywhere and do anything. Like, if you bounced off the water area, what that meant is that you went to a much harder stage first and that difficulty spike became enormous. And I think that was our biggest concern is when you're going to all these areas in the wrong order or maybe you haven't explored the world enough or leveled up your character enough to be where you're supposed to be, you would just get into situations where it would be really rough or just hard to the point where it's not fun.
So I mean, we definitely spent a lot of time and effort to make sure you could get anywhere. And if you got to those situations, we would have shortcuts back or ways to escape and hopefully solve the problem for yourself. There's so many NPCs and so many things that are giving you clues and hints about how to proceed in the world. We're trying to help you as much as we can.
The reason that manual is in the game is because if you're really not figuring it out, hopefully we just put all the information in there for you in a normal context. So I mean, we were definitely worried about it. But at the same time, that is, I think, part of the experience we wanted. We definitely wanted it to have the old-school game Zelda feel where it's like you do get frustrated. You do get frustrated and have to overcome it.
Mina the Hollower
I thought the newspapers were a really elegant solution for that because that was how I found out to go to the crypts.
D'Angelo: Yeah, I mean, we really loved putting that together. You might not know this in playing the game, but the newspaper is actually stitched together based on what you're doing.
Yes, I was just going to say, because you had mentioned if you went to the Bayou and then exited. That's a funny example because I did that exact thing.
D'Angelo: Oh no.
I went to the Bayou and I got stuck. So I wandered away and beat Septemberg. I think that was one of my first, "Oh wow," moments because when I went to see the newspaper, there was a below-the-fold story, "The bayou is still flooded. The people there are dying. No one has come to help." And I was like, "Oh no!" It was such a funny way to find out the world really reacts to me and the choices I'm making. I thought that was such a cool touch and I never would've found it if I hadn't wandered off.
D'Angelo: Yeah, I mean we struggled for a while to figure out how to sort of clue you in a way. I think we were just looking at Victorian stuff that led us to the newspaper like, "Oh yeah, newspapers were like a new thing then. So that would be fun to have the newspaper like, oh, tell you to go here and have little jokes in it and have little clues." And then, "Oh, if it tells you the clue you already did, that's sort of dumb, right?" Oh, so they should be random or cycle in based on what you haven't done or have done.
Mina had a very late 11th-hour delay for polish. What was being worked on with the delay and how do you feel like you benefited from it?
D'Angelo: We delayed it in September, I think, and it was at a point where we could have wrapped it up then actually. It was done enough. Our friends and family were playing it. Some people were saying, "Oh, if you released it as is right now, it would be my favorite game." But at the same time, we just knew some people were still having trouble with it. We had lots of rooms that we just weren't happy with. One of the things we would do as we did playtests, we would go, "This is the worst room in the game." And basically have a competition where we're like, "No, that's the worst one. No, that's the worst one." And we basically just polished it to where the point was you couldn't definitively say any room was the worst room in the game.
So it was more going back to weak spots.
D'Angelo: Yeah, it's buffing out, just making sure it all shines. And then I would say a big, huge chunk of it was just the balancing of it, just that if you go out of order. Say you're like, "I'm just beelining to every boss. I'm not going to do any side content at all. Or if I do only side content, if I'm just doing all that 100% side content to start and then I go play the levels. Or if I have these trinkets and those trinkets or I use these sidearms and I use this weapon," it was a lot of permutations of just ways to play the game that we were just going through over and over and over and trying to make sure no matter how you played the game, hopefully you'd have a good time.
Mina the Hollower
Yeah, it seems like that's tricky to playtest when there's a million permutations and then there's also New Game Plus with the randomizer on.
D'Angelo: Yes, yes, it was a lot. The randomizer actually helped because you're sort of forced to play the game in a way you wouldn't normally play. Oh, well, I guess I started this run with no healing, but I have these healing trinkets, so I'll just go through the game like that. Or, I'm a very defensive build or very platformy kind of build. It forced you into those kinds of situations and it actually helped a lot.
Mina sounded like a very make-or-break moment for the studio. How close to break are we talking? And what would you consider to be a success?
D'Angelo: We don't know anything [Ed note: This interview was conducted just before release.] I mean, we have wishlists. But everyone says those are not dependable anymore. My guess is we'll be fine no matter what. It's just, in what way will we be fine? Are we going to go back to being a five-person studio like the original Shovel Knight? Are we going to be just fine the way we are? Are we going to be so successful that we can make anything we want? I think it's more along those lines. It's not like we're going to close up shop.
