Making Shovel Knight's Signature Moves | Game Maker's Toolkit

Hello!

So my second episode of 2020 is about the four characters in Shovel Knight. And it's available now, on YouTube. 

I had been wanting to make an episode about Shovel Knight's design for a while, but had been waiting for the arrival of the fourth and final hero, King Knight. After some lengthy delays, he finally came out in December 2019.

I originally intended for the video to be about level design. As in, how do you make the same level four times, to fit with four different heroes. But ultimately, I realised that that wouldn't work: Plague Knight uses the exact same levels as Shovel Knight, and King Knight's levels are often so different that they're unrecognisable (if not brand new). 

So instead I looked at the character's signature moves. The key ability at their heart of their mobility design - from Shovel Knight's shovel drop to Plague Knight's bomb burst and so on.

I had a chance to speak to Yacht Club about the moves, which was really helpful. They added a lot of insight which helped the video. I could only show a few clips from it, so you can see the complete interview here:

Yacht Club Games's Sean Velasco and David D'Angelo | GMTK Dev Interviews 

Now, I gotta speak about the thumbnail. I asked my $5 backers to pick the thumbnail for this video. There were a few choices, but this one won by a considerable margin:

I was a bit bummed though, because I wasn't actually a huge fan of that thumbnail and my personal favourite thumbnail was this one:

So I decided to go back to the drawing board and combine the poll winner and my favourite design for the final thumbnail. Hope that's okay!

Of course, I'll always have the "corners" thumbnail in my back pocket in case I need it. I've actually been experimenting with swapping around thumbnails on some videos that didn't quite get the traffic I was hoping for. 

For example, my Hitman 2 video on the Miami level got a pretty bad click-through rate (i.e. people saw the video in their recommendations and largely decided not to click on it). This is what the thumb looked like:

Okay, maybe it's a little dark, the title doesn't mean much to people who haven't played the game, Agent 47 isn't the most attractive bloke on the planet. So I changed it for something quite striking and eye catching:

And it actually had quite an impact. I quickly saw new comments on the video, and views went up. Not a huge amount, but noticeable.

So, just a little experiment and not something I'm going to do a lot. I like my thumbnails! But a nice option to have in my back pocket.

Anyway. Started work on the next episode. It's another big, research heavy multi-game video and so that's gonna take a while (plus, I've got a consulting gig and a mini holiday in Feb) so might be a bit of a wait on that. I'll try and check in before then with something for you, though.

Speak soon!

Oh, almost forgot. Excited to say that six GMTK videos have now passed one million views. That's a nice milestone.

Mark