Shovel Knight 2D platformer turned out to be three-dimensional

An unexpected fact about Shovel Knight: this 2D platformer was created on a three-dimensional engine. The secret of the game was revealed by the developers of Yacht Club Games for the popular YouTube project Boundary Break.

Boundary Break studies the “underside” of video games, changing the angle of the in-game camera to find various secrets and tricks on the levels. In the same way, they studied the platformer about the Shovel Knight. In the 12-minute special episode, you can see that the seemingly two-dimensional picture actually consists of many layers. Different layers were used for the background, for character sprites, for moving platforms and other graphic objects.

Yacht Club Games commented on the choice of a 3D engine for their game, writes GameInformer. It turned out that at the early stages of development, the authors could not decide how they saw Shovel Knight. They took the 3D engine for convenience, but later made a project on it, stylized as 8-bit games for the NES. According to the developers, the use of the 3D engine has greatly simplified the debugging of the game and its porting to other platforms.

Shovel Knight is a classic platformer. It was released on PC, Wii U and 3DS in 2014, and later moved to OS X, Linux, PS3 and the current generation of consoles.

Also on the topic:

• The authors of Shovel Knight doubled the price tag and went to Switch. Result: revenue increased by 115%
• In two years, sales of Shovel Knight reached 1.2 million
• Shovel Knight earned about the same amount with Nintendo 3DS as with Steam