Mina the Hollower
Episode
45 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Startups, Design & UX, Software Development
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Custom Engine Architecture: The Propeller engine separates concerns into three layers: a core rendering/input/audio system, a suite of art pipeline tools for palettes and animations, and a gameplay engine handling collision and combat systems. Console-specific rendering branches call platform APIs so gameplay code stays platform-agnostic, enabling multi-platform shipping without rewriting core logic.
- ✓Authentic Art Constraints Without Hardware Limits: Mina draws textured triangles via modern rendering APIs but mimics Game Boy Color restrictions by limiting each sprite to three colors, using a hand-curated global palette, and splitting large sprites into sub-components matching how Mega Man's two-tile character was split across two hardware sprites on original NES hardware.
- ✓Positional Combat Over Dodge-Roll Design: Rather than the standard attack-attack-dodge loop found in Souls, Hades, and Zelda, Mina's combat uses a 30-frame jump with no mid-air repositioning, forcing players to pre-plan positioning. The burrow acts as a duck, not a universal dodge, with ground attacks introduced progressively to invalidate the burrow as a default escape.
- ✓Trinket Balancing Across 60 Items: With 60 trinkets and six equip slots, balance required thousands of playthroughs to ensure players who struggle with specific mechanics find relevant trinkets organically. Items target distinct skill gaps: pit avoidance, close-range combat, healing timing, and movement speed, preventing the open-world structure from becoming either trivially easy or inaccessibly hard.
- ✓Seven-Round New Game Plus Escalation: Each of seven New Game Plus rounds alters the game structurally rather than just scaling difficulty. Round two flips the world horizontally and removes all items. Round three activates a built-in item randomizer that reshuffles all pickups from the opening gift onward. Round seven scales enemy difficulty to endgame levels in early areas, rewarding deep mechanical mastery.
What It Covers
David D'Angelo, lead programmer at Yacht Club Games, covers the custom C++ "Propeller" engine built for Mina the Hollower, a Game Boy Color-inspired top-down action RPG. Topics include rendering architecture, self-imposed art constraints, Castlevania-influenced combat design, open-world saving systems, and a seven-tier New Game Plus structure.
Key Questions Answered
- •Custom Engine Architecture: The Propeller engine separates concerns into three layers: a core rendering/input/audio system, a suite of art pipeline tools for palettes and animations, and a gameplay engine handling collision and combat systems. Console-specific rendering branches call platform APIs so gameplay code stays platform-agnostic, enabling multi-platform shipping without rewriting core logic.
- •Authentic Art Constraints Without Hardware Limits: Mina draws textured triangles via modern rendering APIs but mimics Game Boy Color restrictions by limiting each sprite to three colors, using a hand-curated global palette, and splitting large sprites into sub-components matching how Mega Man's two-tile character was split across two hardware sprites on original NES hardware.
- •Positional Combat Over Dodge-Roll Design: Rather than the standard attack-attack-dodge loop found in Souls, Hades, and Zelda, Mina's combat uses a 30-frame jump with no mid-air repositioning, forcing players to pre-plan positioning. The burrow acts as a duck, not a universal dodge, with ground attacks introduced progressively to invalidate the burrow as a default escape.
- •Trinket Balancing Across 60 Items: With 60 trinkets and six equip slots, balance required thousands of playthroughs to ensure players who struggle with specific mechanics find relevant trinkets organically. Items target distinct skill gaps: pit avoidance, close-range combat, healing timing, and movement speed, preventing the open-world structure from becoming either trivially easy or inaccessibly hard.
- •Seven-Round New Game Plus Escalation: Each of seven New Game Plus rounds alters the game structurally rather than just scaling difficulty. Round two flips the world horizontally and removes all items. Round three activates a built-in item randomizer that reshuffles all pickups from the opening gift onward. Round seven scales enemy difficulty to endgame levels in early areas, rewarding deep mechanical mastery.
Notable Moment
D'Angelo reveals that Shovel Knight's inability to attack upward was a deliberate design constraint, not a limitation. Playtesters demanded upward attacks, but the team refused because removing directional gaps would eliminate positional decision-making entirely, reducing combat to a trivial exchange rather than a spatial puzzle.
Episode Transcript
Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Howler, which is a top down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D'Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C plus plus engine built for Mina the Howler, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game's Castlevania inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's mod. End game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today, I'm joined by David D'Angelo, lead programmer at Yacht Club Games, developers of the Blood Shovel Knight franchise, and now a new action RPG, Mina the Holloway. David, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. So I'm gonna start in our traditional question. Obviously, you've been at Yacht Club for a while now for a lot of the Shovel Knight years. But what was your journey into game development? Oh, it's sort of a weird one. I went to school for computer science and music. And out of school, I was writing music for commercials. And the guy I was working with said, oh, you should go write music for movies. That'd be really cool. And he's like, go move to LA, and I did. And when I did, it was the financial crisis. And all the studios were closing, and no no one wanted anything. And I was like, well, there's a lot of game studios in LA. Maybe I could, like, get a programming job. What I really wanna do is make games. And I applied at WayForward, which had basically, like, no requirements of any kind. They're like, if you've ever used a programming language, we'll hire you, and it worked. And I got hired, and I worked there for a while, and then we left to Yacht Club and served July. That's amazing. I did not know. Well, funny enough, we've had the way forward folks on this show before. So we've had Voldy come on. That's awesome to hear. And I guess, actually, yeah, your music background, I guess that has also been useful in your game development as well. The soundtracks for your games are fairly well renowned. Oh, for sure. I mean, that has nothing to do with me. That's all Jake, who is a genius. But, yeah, I put in all the sound effects in the game and make sure that, …
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