But if I’ve learned anything from talking to the team at Yacht Club Games this year, it’s that blood, sweat, tears, and the risk of financial ruin in the name of making cool-ass shit can often go overlooked in the context of, say, a Game Boy Color homage. But if we heralded Elden Ring for a synthesis of complex combat, rich lore, and demanding system work, then maybe we owe it to the folks at Yacht Club Games to recognize everything they pulled off in Mina the Hollower. As GOTY talk ramps up and The Game Awards nominations draw near, I asked the folks at Yacht Club to answer a few variants of one basic question: How the hell did you think of this and stuff and how the hell did you pull it off?
Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. David D'Angelo, programmer at Yacht Club Games: Mina actually started with, Alec, the director, as a side project. He wanted to get better at doing art stuff.
He said, “I'm gonna make a little game where I could make Game Boy Color art. But when it came to us actually wanting to make the game, it started way more out of the mechanics perspective because we were interested in making a top-down game. And we were excited about the Castlevania-style gameplay in a top-down space.
No one's done that before. We could tackle that and make it really exciting and interesting. Alec Faulkner, designer at Yacht Club Games: The burrowing in Mina was fully cooked, I would say, by the time I was pitching it to everyone else.
You jumped up in the ground, you held the button to go under. I think the timing is essentially identical, three quarters of a second or something, you can stay under there. And then you gotta pop right out.
That classic Castlevania, like 1-2-3 in Rondo of Blood, that combat has such incredible, fun tension to it. [With Mina], I wanted to stand exactly three-and-a-half feet in front of the enemy, but not four feet and not three feet. And doing that little dance on a single axis, because those are all platformers, is a ton of fun. What if you had another axis and you could move around even more?
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