Ask Me Anything: Q&A with Yacht Club Games' David D'Angelo

[Music] hello happy day 4 of gdc showcase uh i'm gamma future news editor and associate publisher eliza macklin and i'll be moderating today's ama and fielding all your wonderful questions um with yacht club games david d'angelo we'll be taking your questions on game development throughout the chat so be sure to use the questions tab in your chat box on the right side of your screen to submit those and thumbs up other questions from other folks in chat that you'd like to see answered um with that that's as much as i hope to talk here we're just going to get some questions get some expert answers so let's hand things over to today's ama guest david d'angelo hello david can you introduce yourself and tell everybody what you do hey i'm david uh i'm a programmer at yacht club games i've been here since the beginning and uh you know i've worked on games like shovel knight and everything in the series uh and before that i worked on other games but does that's the cool yacht club stuff so shyamalan specter tormenting of cards

plague of shadows uh showdown and more to come and uh we just published cyber shadow that's the latest awesome awesome i'm going to kick off with one small question of myself here uh just and then i will start reading in chat while you're answering that we'll get some chat questions going here um can you talk a little bit about just how yacht club makes these um very distinctly richer inspired games that even cyber shadow which you published has that same kind of vibe to it uh what as a developer and i guess now a publishing company um attracts you guys to that genre uh i mean i think what uh you know one of our goals uh as a company was sort of make games uh that make uh people love games uh and when we were like i guess what we were interested in these old games is essentially like there's a lot of there's a lot of cool ideas and gameplay like design uh and just the way the way

the games were made back then that's like interesting and we thought they should still like they shouldn't go by the wayside by any mean there's like lots of things to love there and we wanted to show people why you should love them so you know with shovel knight we were the we were trying to sort of say like here's like these are like really cool things that people aren't doing anymore that like we want you to love and we want it you know hopefully by the end of the time well when you finish shovel night you like go back in your nes collection or you're like you say to your nine year old you've got to play this old mario game or you like you can sort of see you can like break into those games easier than you could now because they're sort of hard too right um and cyber shadow is like very much the same thing it's like just a different style of a kind of old game that we there's ideas in there that we liked and that we thought we could like bring out and sort of show like why this you know why this thing's still valuable and why you should love it and why you should love these kind of games um so part of that and segwaying here to

a question from dan and chat um is this really tight kind of like platforming that's very indicative of the games of that period and then you have great platforming and tough platforming and shovel knight too um dan wants to know creating good movement in a platformer is essential to creating a nice player experience how did you guys approach um approach perfecting this um for us it's a lot more about like the structure of making something like that i guess that's how we think about designing things in general we we don't like go into something and say like find the fun or like uh you know willy-nilly around with the joystick until it feels just right i guess a game feels just right to us if it's built to feel just right like the like a building feels just right to be in because they thought well a person is you know on average like no taller than like nine feet right you know that's like what you'll feel comfortable going in the door doing so like that's how we generally design our player movement to feel like we had you know we had the basic idea that we

wanted this like one two punch with shovel knight that's like you flip something over and then you down for us it's underside and then we said okay we're making an we're gonna make an nes game of this resolution so that structure means you're going to have like this many tiles on the screen and if you can down thrust you can jump like we want you to be able to jump five tiles because that will like you know that gives you this amount of space you can cover and then if you can down through something you can cover this much much more tiles and that total will be like nine tiles and you'll feel like you got to like eighty percent of the top of the screen and that will feel really satisfying and like and because we've like done this all built it all out with metrics you know when you jump you cover like one third of the screen or something and then we sort of we like we put all these numbers in stone and then we know what the level we're building is going to be like dependent on those numbers and it will feel fun because we've built everything you know so your head doesn't hit the door when you're walking yeah right the

math of fun yeah yeah that's i mean that's like we really we really like put an emphasis here on like like almost like it's like a math problem or you know we have like the high idea but like that when you drill down to actually putting it in the game that's like what it comes down to um and there's like there's i mean there's obviously like variations in that like shovel knight has a very high gravity like fall to him because we said oh he's a character that's like made out of armor so like that's a reason why he should have you know he should fall a little heavier than other characters because it would feel like a little unnatural if you didn't um there's like there's little stuff like that but it's mostly like we're you know we're trying to build it around those metrics because at the end of the day we think like the level design and a game like shovel knight is like what's gonna sell it as being fun so being built around like how do we like we know we can make a fun level with like if he's designed this way and taking that same kind of like formula formulatic kind of approach to

it um does that the same kind of steps and considerations apply when you come back and make like your dlc for like plague night that plays different and the levels are different but the same kind of like considerations and steps in making that definitely definitely there's usually like a high level idea like um spectre night we wanted it to feel like like it was easy to feel cool um and we're like what what feels cool like like being a ninja like walking on walls feels cool and uh you know something we were thinking a lot about at the time was is like a context sensitive like button is like a is a weird complicated thing in most games like you know you walk up to the thing and you're like waiting for the prompt to show up to be it's okay you can press the button now to pick up the item or whatever um so like we we thought about like well we want to like try to make something with that problem and that's like where we came up with the dashlash and then like once we had those like concepts it's like well the wall climb should be like this high and the and the dashboard should like

bring you this far and it should only do like two angles because if it did more angles it would be like too hard to design a level out of um it's like a lot it's like a lot of the same like breaking it down like that oh i just had one that you just kind of answered the question i was going to throw at you from thomas in chat uh wants to know how was the process for you and the team creating such interesting signature moves for each character but you kind of just talked about that there so that can almost work i mean it's it's it's really often like a lot of those a lot of those things it's like we look at the character we say like yeah or we like design a character it is it's either like you have the idea first or you have a character and you're making the idea out of the character right but um often it's like we have a character and there's like something we want to tackle with it um you know like like i said with spectre night like we have a cool character so it should feel like really easy to be like cool uh let's see uh scott here in chat would like to know uh what role do design patterns play on your work do you have any particular favorites

uh i'm not sure exactly what is meant by design patterns okay move on from that one then i guess you are uh you wear mini hats but it's the programmer hats the one that fits the most comfortably i suppose yeah uh how about a tools question then um what kind of software development processes do you use at yacht club agile with sprints extreme programming your own kind of thing it seems like you have the whole team's input on many aspects of the game so they were curious and that is from joseph uh we use sprints we do we typically i mean it can change over the course of the project but we do like an agile thing with two-week sprints and it's i mean it's very very loosely agile i would say but we are pretty like we're pretty adamant about like everyone if you're working on something you made a task and you like put in the bug base and you assigned a number of points to it and like i guess everyone feels i think everyone at the end of the day feels better if they know like this is the thing that's going to ship

out a date and i know how long my tasks are taking uh and we can all sort of like track each other and know when there's like holes in the you know group dynamic or like you know someone doesn't have enough work or has too much work and that kind of stuff so we tried it how big is your team right now we're i think we're 24 people okay um um okay so quite a ways up there now um with kind of that and you'd mentioned prior when i was interrogating you before we went live that um you're kind of a studio that doesn't like titles so much or a lot of you wear a lot of different hats um how with that kind of process you just described how do you as a team make sure everyone knows what they should be doing or has a clear understanding of where they are where they need to be well we do a lot we have a lot of meetings all the time but uh yeah like every you know uh every week or two weeks we'll have a big meeting where we go through like

everything on the agile board and we say you know this is the progress of everything that's there here's oh here's what we need to do oh uh you don't have enough things right now uh you know maybe maybe in the next sprint we should like cue up this thing um you know uh but in general we have a lot of like structure built in by the design so it's like we know we're making we're gonna work on pride more keep the stage right we know we're gonna make five enemies five objects because that's like what goes into a stage and like there's sort of like a pipeline and a churn around that okay um another i'm gonna the question i was gonna grab for joseph is from joseph excuse me as well uh does yacht club games use any third party tools for debugging organizing tiling and etc or they all developed in-house could you elaborate on the ones you use if so uh pretty much uh most stuff is inside in-house we use tiled for level editor um

and we use like google sheets uh for like putting text in the game um trying to think if there's anything else our our collision our collision system was uh box 2d although that's like not great and i would not recommend that to every anyone uh and we've like mostly stripped it out uh but i mean i wouldn't recommend it for our kind of game maybe maybe for your kind of game it's perfect cool yeah it was just kind of like quizzing you on all like uh five years ago what did you think about this yes it's an ama um let's see luke here um wants to know if you have any advice for new developers who are jumping into a large code base for the first time or how to get caught up to speed with a project uh my advice uh for that kind of thing is always to start doing something um i would i like for me it's best or at least personally i find it's easiest when you like pick something and you say i'm gonna do this

and then like the path of like that leading to you having to get that thing done probably involves you touching a bunch of stuff or like learning at all um as opposed to like i don't know if you just like scan all the files and read them it's like you probably get bored and confused and don't know what's going on um like you know setting a lot of break points and just like stepping through the loop of like how things are getting run is an easy obvious thing to do um yeah um sometimes like finding us if you like look play like say you had a game and you played it and you find a small bug and thinking like i'm going to fix that bug right and just like trying to do that can just like go a long way i'm kind of in a similar vein here christopher says that their programming teacher once said that being a programmer isn't about knowing how to code something but more knowing how to find out how to make your code work what are some resources you use when you need to do some research on how to make your code work

uh well that's an interesting question i don't really use so many resources to get it to work um i guess i like really depend on like debuggers and uh like tools and like printing things and making debug tools and uh that kind of stuff i like uh i you know i uh i like may i have know the ins and outs of all that kind of stuff and and that's not like how i if i can't figure out why something's broken or whatever i'm like really reliant on that kind of stuff um but if i'm like tackling if i was tackling a new problem that i didn't know how to do i would i would just be uh you know some kind of math problem or whatever i'd be like looking at old papers or like going through you know presentations or projects that people did in the past and just trying to gather as much information as i could even if i like am not going to do those things at all sometimes it's good to

just have those things in your brain as like these are techniques people did in the past um next one here sorry there's a lot of them coming in and i can only read so fast um when your company was first formed how did you find key people artists programmers and et cetera to work on shovel knight um how were you able to fund them when you weren't making money before your kickstarter took off uh shovel knight the team basically came from another studio so it was the five of us we all worked together um and that's sort of why we left us because we wanted to keep working together and they wouldn't let us so we said we're going to start our own company instead and make a game and so uh i mean we le we started that in january and in march we launched the kickstarter so people basically it was like a few months of running off their own uh savings it's the uh kind of startup the indie startup dream there is just kind of like we had savings and we

didn't eat expensively for a couple of months before we took off the whole shuffle night development no one was eating um let's see here what's your favorite famicom nes game from peter uh my favorite nes game is mario 3 i think it's like i don't know it's it's like one of the best games i've ever made in my opinion it's just like a blast to jump in and do a little bit or it's a blast of spend eight hours trying to go through every level there's just like a lot of brilliant ideas in there and it's uh you know anything uh you remember from there that kind of this is kind of this inspiration core behind what you do now um you know what i what i think about that game the most is just like how much how many ideas are crammed into every inch of the game uh and i uh when i think about like the biggest difference between like games now and then it's like now it's like in over world it's like a huge massive open world right and there's like a million miles of

space but there's like nothing to do in that space uh or at least you have to like walk a mile to get to anything uh and just my i just like this just the how much like every single screen has like 30 things that are like exciting and new and different and you haven't seen them yet and uh it just it just is always blowing my mind when i play that game um oh gosh no i checked stone and i scrolled uh as a programmer from misha here uh what is your favorite and or least favorite part to code physics for example versus shooting mechanics or anything else kind of applicable for you um [Music] let's see i guess my my least favorite thing is uh i don't know like plumbing stuff i don't know describe it um i guess some stuff feels like grunt

work in a way that's like well we like i don't know it's like well we gotta like port this function over to like 50 things or we gotta like uh get this um like the more foundational work that you have to do before you can do the fun stuff it's like i gotta write a vector class or whatever um that kind of it's like the stuff that's like or stuff that people have done like a million times and now i'm doing it uh and it's like well i don't really have anything to add or there's no nothing exciting or fun about this um oh my gosh sorry i'm so sorry there's so many questions answered that one here uh let's see do you see design-wise as or an advantage to 8-bit constraints that can't just be inherently produced on contemporary platforms you kind of talked about this earlier um with how like why you were drawn to the kind of like 8-bit 16-bit area but um i guess how how do those constraints um

that come with that uh area of game how do those inform your guys's development process and that is from peter in chat um yeah i mean i think there's like a few things that the constraints are really good for one is like a big thing about those games was like they couldn't do that much so they had to rely on your imagination a lot um and that's like one of the core things we took it's like shovel knight can be a cool guy or a cute guy or a girl or you know whatever you want um and but we're gonna like put like because of those restrictions like the shovel knight is like sort of forced into something where we have to rely on people's imagination to make it more exciting and because of that that sort of like inspires our ideas in general to be like it leaning in that direction like well how about we like don't answer all the questions you might have in a story or how about we uh you know we leave those open so you can like fill in the blanks for like what is meaningful in your life and that

you know shovel name and shield might have a relationship we don't say what that relationship is but like you could think as if you're an eight-year-old you like don't obviously have girlfriends or whatever you might be like that's your sister or that's your friend uh and that's like what is meaningful to you when uh you're reunited with steel knight at the end of the game um so there's like those kind of restrictions then i think there's there's other stuff that just like it helps us make a game faster and uh you know be there's like less options and we've like restricted our like the set like if you're building with legos you like have to build a certain way and you have to do certain things and you can get a lot of creativity out of legos you can make almost anything right um but like because of that i think it helps like you just don't have like the sprawling of it could be anything in the world what do we do is that that applies like behind the scenes too like mechanically and like with like the code base that you work

with as well the same kind of constraints come into play in a way might have frozen here ah we'll be right back in one second i think we have a frozen webcam issue uh so i guess this is a great time if you have any other questions to take your time typing them out are we back i'm back cool all right i talked my way through it we're live yeah i heard that like it applies it doesn't we don't like our code base is very modern i guess that doesn't apply in that respect but uh you know the way we're that anything we're thinking about putting in the game is like we think with those intentions of mind like we can't i mean we don't blood in our game but imagine we did and you know a guy died and she couldn't spew blood right uh because it's yeah we don't we can't just display 50 particles that would be weird all of a sudden uh so there's like that kind of thing i think there's like the game uh noida i think it's called where they have like yeah every pixel simulator it's insane it's wild um so i guess

kind of building off of that was that a deliberate choice when you guys went into shovel knight um because you hear uh there's a very great gamma feature vlog i can't remember the name of now but someone talked about how in 2020 they went and they made a game an nes game that could run on an nes they used all the kind of restrictions that you would expect in that area era did you guys ever think about doing something like that when you made this or did you always kind of want to have here's what this kind of game could be in a modern development setting we always wanted it to be what the modern thing would be we wanted it to be like i guess uh an old nes game is hard to get into like it doesn't even fill the whole screen on your tv anymore right uh so we thought like our intention was like we want it to be like the bridge between those games we want you to be like you feel very comfortable with this game because it feels modern in every respect um but it has you know but it like also you can also see why it is a retro thing and why you would once you play that maybe you like are more comfortable like you know

trying that kind of food kind of thing a good starter starter platform yeah yeah uh let's see uh oh here's one uh from catherine uh who's been a frequent question asker throughout gdc showcase so far so thank you catherine um what is it like to see your character show up in a massive property like smash did you have any creative involvement in shovel knight's representation there uh it i mean it's like it's unbelievable it's very it's i mean i played millions of hours of smash in my life and to see shovel knight uh appear in that is like it's just so humbling and also extremely bizarre uh it's just lovely and uh yeah we uh we were i mean we were involved in like making sure the character was like correct right uh and that kind of thing but uh beyond that um it was i mean it's all it's all nintendo being brilliant

uh let's see kickstarter i think i asked that one already to do reading out loud is very exciting content from me um let's see oh here's one um from stephen and chad wants to know what is the most challenging chapter of shovel knight's development for you is there anything that stands out that you can remember and kind of share with the audience today um you know i think the hardest part was like actually after re-released and it was like oh now we like we like intended this was a real company but now we like have to actually be one uh and like we're we gotta like finish this kickstarter stuff and we have to like sustain our lives forever and figure out you know we have to like learn how to hire people and just the just the like learning like i don't know we we had all

gotten into video games to make games not to like run a company or uh or none of us had any knowledge about like what you know oh god we have to like file taxes now for the company jesus like this is so stupid uh yeah that kind of stuff and and just like how overwhelming it was to be like uh we have we've like made a thing that like it's not just ours anymore right um and i we we came from uh working and making games on contract essentially where you know a publisher would hire the studio to make a game and once we really once we finished the development on the game it might not even come out for a year and when it came out it would be like we had nothing to do with it you know and so we like being involved in a game like forever is such a weird a weird thing for us to wrap our heads around as a collective uh in that kind of like difficult transition from just a bunch of people making games to a company do you think you're through that yet do you still kind of feel at times like oh my

gosh what are we doing or i mean i always feel like what are we doing oh i mean i think everyone feels like that that's like part of life but uh yeah i mean i think there's like some you know obviously we figured out more things than we'd had figured out previously but i mean even like i mean earlier this year we hired uh you know we were like 16 people or something and we hired up to 24 and we're like okay let's write like what the pillars of the company are because we like didn't have those before because we hired so slowly over time we like didn't need to do that and now we hired like eight people at once and they're like what is this company right and we're like oh well we probably should like tell people what it is um i guess kind of just talking about like the hiring process because there are a bunch of we've had a lot of questions from students uh in past like chats and just people who are kind of new into the industry um when you're hiring someone bringing someone on the team what do you look for and what do you kind of recommend people looking to get their foot in the door should do to get their foot in the door

um well if you've like never done anything before ever it's like it's hard to want to hire you i mean it's like a classic problem i know i mean i know i felt this when i was in school it's like how do you get a job when you've like never had a job because they're like looking for job experience so i would say like the things you should do are make it look like you've done something and are interested in what you're doing so it's like i don't know if you're going to get a job at to be a level designer you should show like a thousand mario maker levels you've made or if you're like going to get a job as a programmer you should have like code you're proud of to show or you should be like here's a little tiny game i made even if it's like embarrassing it's like i i recreated snake uh on in flash or whatever and i coded it all myself and i you know and as long as you like that shows that you could like start and finish something and uh like maybe you could add your own creative idea to like one dumb thing to it and it's like then it's yours and someone can point and say well they like you know they like this kind

of thing and they're like interested and invested in doing it um that that's like important and i would say like it should be clear that you like are interested in the place you're applying to uh so like make do your research when you go in and like show you know like like look up the people that work there or like uh you know like play some of their games or like really get into it because like that's that's what they're gonna care about um it's not like you you will be part of the team and you'll fit in and you'll have ideas that like make sense and you'll be able to contribute in like a meaningful way even if you like suck right now um so there's like is that an adventure time quote where it's like sucking at something the first step to being great at it yeah that's right yeah it's all about the journey uh let's see i think i can get one more question in here i'm just scrolling through um a bunch of people are curious about developing for the wii u

do you have any meaningful tidbits on that pros and cons don't do it it's there's no reason to right now um i don't know it was i mean it's it's like one of the uh it's it's a weird it was a weird platform to develop very quirky right like did you guys have touchscreen integration in what you were doing yeah yeah how how was that between the screens yeah we just i think it was you just pick though you could like pick your gear like what relic you had equipped and stuff quickly from that um and yeah it's and we had miever support too which is a whole fun all right verse we miss you um let's see let's close off here with one from quan in chat who wants to know how is creating a game that has influenced modern 2d platformers um make your kind of change your approach to new projects oh wow uh well i i that's great to think that we could have

affected anyone but i don't believe it i'm not on board but i guess it really it really i don't feel like it has affected how we're what we're developing next uh we sort of you know i think we set you know we said we wanted to make games that like make you love games and that's still our still what we're doing i guess the idea that it like it worked was like okay we'll keep doing it um so that's sort of like where we're going it's like we want to do the same thing uh you know just a different way we're gonna like pull from different things that uh you know we think are being lost or forgotten or people say are bad and we think they're like there could be a good version of it um like that's still what we're trying to do and uh sounds like a freeing way to move forward it's just to kind of be like now we're gonna do what got us here in the first place and just go with our gut yeah yeah like what's going to come out is going to be be fairly different i think uh but uh

you'll like yeah i think it'll be easy to see like oh this is like obviously this makes sense for them kind of thing awesome well looking forward to uh hearing that with some proper nouns in the future [Laughter] with that we are completely out of time but a few seconds over here um david thank you so much for joining us for this chat uh chat thank you so much for your questions um david if they wanted to bother you about anything else curiosity is where should they reach out to you at i've got a twitter at dandy ycg you can ping me there or you can email y'all called games anytime awesome thank you so much for joining us and everyone else have a wonderful rest of your gdc showcase bye