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.
A Journey of Uncertainty and Community
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.
The Souls-Like Connection and Zelda's Legacy
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.
Embracing Modifiers and Player Choice
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.
