New 3D Shovel Knight game is more than 50% complete, may be Yacht Club's next project after Mina the Hollower

A new 3D Shovel Knight game could be the next project in line for Yacht Club Games, assuming Mina The Hollower does well enough sales-wise.

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Yacht Club Games just released their latest title, Mina The Hollower, a top-down indie with a distinct retro look and feel. Mina hearkens back to the classic days of gaming, combining sentiments and visuals from games like Link's Awakening on Game Boy and even Gremlins 2 on NES. The result is a nostalgic mash-up that innovates and evolves the formula, complete with boss battles and loot.

Now that their mouse precision-platformer is out, the indie studio is turning their attention on new things. One of these projects is a mysterious Shovel Knight game set in 3D. Sean Velasco, the head of Yacht Club, tells Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that this 3D game is more than halfway complete and could be showable soon.

Whatever the group chooses to work on, Velasco says that the teams won't ever be split up again for simultaneous parallel work--"We're going to want to stick together, no matter what we do," he told Bloomberg.

Speculation insists that Yacht Club's next game will select another kind of generational leap in graphics to follow the established timeline from classic gaming.

For instance, Shovel Knight represents the NES and SNES era, whereas Mina The Hollower reaches into the Game Boy era with its heavy influences from Link's Awakening, while also making use of classic NES/SNES sensibilities along the way.

Based on this, it's possible that the 3D Shovel Knight game could take cues from games that made major breakthroughs during the 3D era, including The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. It's possible that this new Shovel Knight game could be based on OoT and even Majora's Mask to follow the retro-themed chronology of classic gaming while also helping innovate the franchise in a new way.

Nothing has been announced regarding this project so far.