yacht club games lead artist

Shovel Knight developer is giving away nearly a decade of artwork

Download the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove asset pack for free

Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games has released a massive pack of concept art from the last seven years. 

You can pick up the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove art asset pack for free right now under the Creative Commons 4.0 license. You get, as Yacht Club has explained via Kickstarter , a nearly 1 GB zip file containing all of the art from the 7 years of the game's production. That's a whole lot of Shovel Knight, if anyone's counting. 

"We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time," Yacht Club wrote on Kickstarter. "The spark of the idea came way back in 2013 during the Shovel Knight Kickstarter when someone shared with us a picture of an unknown game dev at a game jam using Shovel Knight sprites as reference. He was making art for HIS game referencing art from OUR game. We love the idea of enabling other game devs!"

The assets included in the gigantic pack include "huge" pixel art, with sprites, animation cycles, backgrounds, and even some cut content sprinkled throughout for good measure. You'll need to use a program called Pro Motion NG to view some of the raw content, which Yacht Club has suggested themselves.

If you're thinking that sifting through a huge repository of art from an excellent platforming series sounds like a great weekend activity, Yacht Club Games has you covered. 

If you'd much rather play the actual game, you can pick up Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC. 

Here are 25  new indie games of 2022  to keep an eye on.

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Yacht Club on finishing Shovel Knight's story and becoming indie publishers

Here's what fans are still discovering about red dead …, how sekiro aims to resurrect the action rpg genre, a treasure trove of publishing.

King of Cards is the biggest adventure of all the Shovel Knight stories

© Yacht Club Games

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Yacht Club Games finds there’s more retro life after ‘Shovel Knight’

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There’s a difference between a love letter to a genre and a complete re-creation.

To avoid tackling ground already covered when making video games that reference the 8- and 16-bit eras of the 1980s and ‘90s, Yacht Club Games co-founder David D’Angelo says one of his go-to references is “You’ve Got Mail.” Yes, the 1998 Nora Ephron-directed rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Or, specifically, its relationship to the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch-directed film that inspired it, “The Shop Around the Corner.”

“It’s the same thing,” D’Angelo says in discussing how the West Los Angeles team behind the retro hit game “Shovel Knight” developed the mission statement for Yacht Club. Viewing “You’ve Got Mail” alongside the original “The Shop Around the Corner,” he says, can at times be a challenge for audiences weaned on more recent acting and filmmaking techniques.

“In watching ‘The Shop Around the Corner,’ I could see why someone would want to remake it,” he says. “There are so many good things in it. A lot of them translate directly to ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ but ‘You’ve Got Mail’ was modern. And yet there are so many parts of the original movie that transcend time. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re putting it in a new box that helps you understand why it’s important,” he says of each game.

Since 2013, when “Shovel Knight” became an early Kickstarter sensation, Yacht Club has been hyper-focused on games starring the hit’s titular hero — a knight, of course, armed with, well, a shovel. Sales reached 2.6 million across multiple consoles and iterations as he swung, dug and pounced his way through ghostly kingdoms filled with colorful characters, a conniving alchemist and the occasional exploding rat.

While the 24-person team isn’t abandoning its armored digger, Yacht Club is looking ahead to new projects and this year took on publishing duties, releasing “Cyber Shadow,” a title that nods to vintage Nintendo Entertainment System works such as “Ninja Gaiden” and “Shadow of the Ninja.”

The creation of Finnish developer Aarne Hunziker, “Cyber Shadow” (available for home computers and all major consoles) appealed to Yacht Club because it allowed the studio to continue mining history while attempting to refresh it.

“Cyber Shadow,” like 2018 Sabotage Studio revivalist title “The Messenger,” celebrates the quick sword-slash action of the vintage video game genre that keyed in on America’s pop-culture fascination with ninja films and ninja-inspired characters in the ‘80s. Protagonists, for instance, who operate mostly on their own but largely on the side of good. They are outsider heroes with smarts who tapped into an individualist ideal while exploring the tension between a belief in and a mistrust of institutions.

D’Angelo, now 35, doesn’t get too academic, however, when discussing his love of a genre he came to through “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” noting that the sci-fi-inspired mechanical world of “Cyber Shadow” also owes a heavy debt to “The Terminator.” The goal was a game that captured the instant approachability of NES titles, but was more forgiving to players while using varied, unexpected level design while gradually layering on abilities, all while staying true to a two-button control scheme.

D’Angelo even laughs a bit at the difficulty in explaining the addictive appeal of the works that influenced “Cyber Shadow.”

“The gameplay of it is so unbelievable simple,” D’Angelo says. “It’s sort of hard to say why it would be fun. Like, I jump and I hit an enemy and it’s dead in one slash. That’s all there is to it.”

But when it’s responsive, that frenetic energy, says D’Angelo, “really puts you in the mood of being a ninja.”

“When I press a button, I’m immediately six feet in the air, and when I press that button again, I’ve completely disintegrated a robot,” he says. “Giving that power to someone who’s even 4 years old is not something you can experience any other way.”

So what then makes “Cyber Shadow” a 2021 game rather than a 1990 one? “The main reason is just this starts really simple, and slowly over time the complexity of the character grows. It’s still a two-button game, but the number of actions you can do is 12 or something like that.”

Adds studio producer Sunni Pavlovic, “I don’t think it’s so much about capturing the retro nostalgia one for one. When I think of older games, it’s about capturing the feeling. How did that feel when you were 8 or 10? But making it still have the modern sensibilities we’re used to, whether it’s the color scheme or fonts we’re used to.”

Or more diverse characters and a broader understanding of the cultural role games can play. And while some studios and players gravitate toward retro-styled games because they crave the sometimes punishing difficulty of titles of that era, when save points were uncommon and grueling challenges were seen more as a badge of honor, D’Angelo and Pavlovic stress the Yacht Club thesis is to show that play is approachable and joyful.

“Shovel Knight,” for instance, kept things interesting with updates and new playable characters, necessitating a rethinking of the level design to respond to different abilities rather than trying to make a piece fit where it didn’t belong. While “Cyber Shadow” isn’t as vast a game — and it also isn’t exactly easy — players will discover a rhythm as new moves and interactions are learned. And while there are hidden paths and plenty of traversal, “Cyber Shadow” varies the pace with relatively intimately framed boss battles, requiring a more nuanced focus.

Above all else, however, Yacht Club’s core goal is to distill games down to a base language. It isn’t currently interested, for instance, in taking full advantage of today’s controllers with their multiple triggers and joysticks.

“It’s really complicated,” D’Angelo says. “The games are using all those buttons and using them in context-specific situations. You get in a helicopter and that controls differently than when you’re in a plane and that controls differently than when you’re walking on the ground. That could be cool, in that the complexity of the interactions leads to variety, but we were really thrilled how you could get the same level of depth out of just maybe three things.”

And while the “Shovel Knight” story is finished for now — “We’re exhausted,” D’Angelo says, referencing the eight-year focus on the brand — the studio likely won’t stay away forever. Someday, says D’Angelo, the team dreams of seeing a “Shovel Knight” cartoon become a reality, and Pavlovic succinctly sums up the Yacht Club mindset when it comes to in-house developed, non-”Shovel Knight” games.

“Something that’s really important to us is that it should be heartwarming,” Pavlovic says. “It should be uplifting. It should be positive. That’s something we need. There are world events happening around us, and I know for myself I don’t want to play a game where it’s a dystopia.”

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Yacht Club Games

• Edit source

Yacht Club Games is an American independent video game development studio and publisher founded in 2011 by former WayForward Technologies director Sean Velasco, [1] and is located in Los Angeles, CA. It is also best known as the creator of the Shovel Knight series.

• 2.1 Games Developed and Published
• 2.2 Games Published
• 2.3 Side Projects
• 4 References

History [ ]

Yacht Club Games was founded by former developers from WayForward Technologies who wished to work on their own titles. The company announced their first title, Shovel Knight , on March 14, 2013. They financed its development through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and released it on June 26, 2014. [2] Following the stretched goal of the Kickstarter campaign, the developers added more content to the base game from 2015 to 2018. With each new campaign being as large as the original main game, the developers decided to change the economic model of Shovel Knight . The original game, which includes all content, was renamed Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove , and all campaigns and the Battle Mode are available to purchase separately. [3]

In addition to their own title, Yacht Club Games also published Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack in North America, an enhanced collection of the first and second Azure Striker Gunvolt games developed by the Japanese studio Inti Creates . [4]

Yacht Club Games are very active on Twitter , where they constantly post, updates, events of interest, sales in the digital shops, as well as jokes such as the Shovel Knight IRL: Physical Game Cameo Extravaganza!! .

Games Developed and Published [ ]

Games Published [ ]

Side Projects [ ]

Gallery [ ]

References [ ]

• ↑ New studio Yacht Club Games sails away with a crew from WayForward on Warp Zoned
• ↑ Shovel Knight on Kickstarter
• ↑ Switch-up! on yachtclubgames.com
• ↑ Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack by on yachtclubgames.com
• 1 Plague Knight
• 2 Specter Knight

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Yacht Club Games Announces New Mainline Shovel Knight Game is in Development - News

Yacht Club Games   announced a new mainline  Shovel Knight  game is currently in development.

Before we go, we have one final announcement: a brand new mainline Shovel Knight game is in development!," said the developer,

"We're committed to crafting an experience that not only honors the Shovel Knight legacy but also pioneers groundbreaking, innovative gameplay mechanics. This isn't just another sequel - it's a bold new adventure that will launch Shovel Knight into an entirely new dimension of gaming. 

"We're not quite ready to unveil everything just yet, rest assured, the game will bring electrifying action, richer mechanics, and all the timeless charm you expect from a Shovel Knight title.

"It's been four years in the making because we're dedicated to perfecting every pixel and ensuring that the innovation will redefine what a Shovel Knight game can be."

A life-long and avid gamer,  William D'Angelo   was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own   YouTube channel  and  Twitch channel . You can contact the author  on Twitter  @TrunksWD .

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Artist behind bored ape yacht club to unveil new nfts at art basel.

Seneca, the lead artist behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), one of the most celebrated NFT projects, will be debuting five NFTs on Saturday at Art Basel in Miami.

Four will likely be sold at auction at the ICONOCLAST art exhibition. The fifth, a BAYC-related piece, will go up for auction next year, the artist told The Defiant.

The NFTs will be minted on Ethereum, but hosted on the Internet Computer, a blockchain built for and developed by the DFINITY Foundation. In theory, because the NFTs will be 100% on-chain, they can’t be taken down as they can when hosted on centralized servers like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Seneca has had frustrations with the traditional art market, a world which has up to now treated digital art as a second class relative to its physical counterpart.

“The fact that you can authenticate a digital asset, that’s revolutionary. That changes the game entirely,” she said, adding that NFTs will give digital art a seat at the table in the traditional art market.

Bored Ape Yacht Club was Seneca’s first foray into the NFT world and the artist is excited about the possibilities of the emerging field. “Of course watching the project become this, you know, crazy empire is amazing, but also, I continue to look forward. I’m like, what’s next?”

Seneca teased a potential NFT drop for 2022 but wasn’t ready to share details. “What I made for Art Basel is just the start for me,” the artist said.

Read the original post on The Defiant .

Yacht Club Games bids farewell to Shovel Knight

COO James Chan on how unexpected success led to an unexpected five year dev cycle, and the studio's Blizzard-esque approach to what comes next

As a studio, Yacht Club Games is remarkable not just for its success, but also its transparency. Search our archives and you'll find multiple news stories based on the kind of data that most developers guard like a vial of magic potion. That was true back in 2014 , when its first (and still only) IP Shovel Knight had been on the market for a month, and it has stayed true in the five years that have passed since.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom, Yacht Club COO James Chan says that the reason for the regular, minutely detailed blog posts on costs and marketing and sales has always been the same. Game development is "aspirational," and the industry has never been transparent enough to really help developers just starting out.

"It's a little bit voodoo magic and a little bit rockstar, all at the same time," Chan says. "People love playing games -- it can be the core of their personality -- but making games always seems like a magical thing that you don't know how to do.

"We love to share information because we believe in it... It's not only going to make us better as an industry, but also be inspirational to others. 'They're sharing everything, and now it's my turn to try.'"

"We love to share information because we believe in it... It's going to make us better as an industry"

A side benefit of that consistently open philosophy is the opportunity to compare then with now. In its first info dump after Shovel Knight's launch, Yacht Club planned to fund a team of five people for two years, based on lifetime sales of 150,000 units. Let's just say it beat that target, and then some.

"It went a lot better than that, yeah," Chan says, smiling. "As of last month it was 2.65 million, and we're now 17 people. I think the place will probably stay quite small for the foreseeable future. We try to maintain a flat corporate structure, which makes expansion a little bit difficult, but that's our DNA as a company."

Yacht Club far exceeded its own projected sales and headcount, but the other key metric here is time. At one point, the studio had only planned for two years into its own future, but the Shovel Knight Kickstarter campaign launched in March 2013, and Chan is at Gamescom 2019 pushing more content -- specifically King of Cards and Showdown -- for the same basic product. Yacht Club, it seems, is still working through the promises it made to those very early backers.

"Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals," Chan says. "We've been developing this for five straight years now; it's just content updates, and it's all free content updates, because it's stuff we promised. We're very lucky to have fans who bought multiple copies or are bringing other people in, which allows us to continue to make the game.

"[King of Cards and Showdown] is the end of the Kickstarter list. That's it. This will be the wrap up, this will be the end of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, and then it'll be pre-production on the next thing, which we're not quite sure what it is yet. We're gonna end the five year dev cycle, take a couple of weeks off, and then come back and say 'Okay, what are we gonna do?'"

Chan is referring to the company's next game, of course, but it is also using the success and stability that Shovel Knight created to make what is an increasingly familiar move: third-party publishing. In fact, Yacht Club published Inti Creates' Gunvolt Striker Pack in the US back in 2016, but it proved to be a step too far, too soon at that point. Chan only joined the company the following year, and his experience allowed the founders to focus on making games while he assessed and shaped the business -- publishing strategy included.

"Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals"

"It was time the development team just didn't have." Chan says. "We were already apologetic about how long it was taking to finish King of Cards, so I was the one who could actually push that forward.

"Our publishing philosophy, a lot of it is sharing knowledge. We're not 'Here's a bunch of money, go make your game, we'll QA it and send it out.' We care a lot about the developer. We show them our development tools, which they might want to make for themselves, and then they own their process better.

"They have access to our creative, we review all the work, we play the game, we record ourselves playing the game... We send all of that feedback. We try to provide that perspective."

With so many indie publishers scouting for product, any new player in the market needs to offer something distinct to potential partners. With Yacht Club, it's a very close, very open relationship in which all of the knowledge it accumulated selling 2.65 million units of Shovel Knight is there for the taking. This has its limits, Chan explains, specifically the number of third-party games it's possible for the company to handle, given the effort and time it wants to put in to each one.

"It's probably a more expensive form of publishing than anyone else is doing," Chan says. "We're not just selling a game. We're sharing all of the knowledge we have so that they can become a successful developer, too... We hope that they come back to us for the next game, but if they don't, that's fine."

In terms of both publishing and internal development, Nintendo platforms will remain a key focus for Yacht Club Games. Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of Shovel Knight's early success was just how well it performed on the Wii U, a struggling platform that was close to being written off at the time. This was widely seen as evidence that Yacht Club knew exactly where to find the best audience for its product, and the same was true when it launched to great success on the Switch in 2018.

"The Switch is still a really good platform for us. It's where gamers that speak our language are"

"It was so early that we benefited from people having nothing else to buy," Chan adds, noting that Shovel Knight was among the first wave of third-party titles on both Wii U and Switch. "We were lucky then, but we do still see that the Switch is a really good platform for us. It's where gamers that speak our language are. It's definitely going to be our main focus."

This will be the case with the first game to launch under Yacht Club's renewed publishing strategy: Cyber Shadow, from the Finnish indie developer Mechanical Head Studios. According to Chan, everyone at the company had a say in which game was selected, and Cyber Shadow was deemed the best fit for Yacht Club's brand identity, what it looks for in a partner, and its expectations of success. Every box was ticked.

It also fits into what Yacht Club considers its own style; not a maker of "retro platformers," which Chan believes is often the impression people have due to Shovel Knight, but a studio dedicated to the more broad area of "classic gaming."

"You can have totally modern art," Chan says, "but as long as the experience speaks to the classic gamer then we think that's okay."

The most obvious lingering mystery, then, is exactly what Yacht Club itself will make next. Chan is insistent that the team has not yet decided, preferring to draw a line under Shovel Knight before it makes any serious commitment to a new idea. That kind of time is a luxury that 2.65 million sales provides, and while Chan is aware that the line between taking your time and wasting your money can be difficult to see, he cites Blizzard Entertainment as a role model in how Yacht Club is approaching the careful development of its next game.

"If it's not good," he says, "we don't release it."

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The NFT Art World Wouldn’t Be the Same Without This Woman’s ‘Wide-Awake Hallucinations’

By Samantha Hissong

Samantha Hissong

Her creativity helped fuel a technological revolution she knew almost nothing about. Although the Bored Ape Yacht Club — now, arguably, the world’s biggest NFT project — first appeared online in May and quickly started selling for millions, the woman who drew its primary characters had no idea that the collection was a hit until she Googled the name months later.

These cartoonish primates have since generated more than a billion dollars and lassoed mainstreamers into the crypto scene. Yet Seneca — the 27-year-old Asian-American artist who played an integral role in bringing their ideas to life — gets little credit.

Watching NFT enthusiasts graffiti every corner of the Internet with variations of her work has been bittersweet. Imagine casually walking into a museum only to stumble upon your own art hanging on the wall behind velvet ropes; when Seneca logged onto Twitter, where she’s known as All Seeing Seneca , and saw that Steph Curry was using an avatar she birthed as his profile picture, her eyes bulged. “It really took me some time to wrap my head around all this,” she tells Rolling Stone over Zoom . She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of her living room in her Manhattan apartment, in front of a small gray couch — under which she somewhat haphazardly stores a stack of pastel paintings. “I still am. It’s still quite surreal.”

Behind the couch is her tiny, usually cluttered workspace, which Seneca calls her studio. Born in the U.S. to Chinese parents and raised in Shanghai, Seneca came back stateside to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating in 2016, and then relocating to New York as a freelance illustrator, this nook became her office. Head down, she concentrated on designing vibrant, at-times fantastical characters à la 2D animation for marketing campaigns and advertisements. (While her paintings were and are more abstract, she was compelled to find a “realistic” way of monetizing her passion.)

When a creative agent named Nicole Muniz spotted her college portfolio — and fell in love with her technique, “down to the lines and brushstrokes,” according to Muniz  — she started connecting Seneca with companies across various industries like healthcare, insurance, green energy, and finance. Last year, Muniz, who’s also known by her pseudonym V Strange, called Seneca with a somewhat left-of-center proposal: Her childhood friend was starting something called the Bored Ape Yacht Club, she had jumped aboard as an advisor, and he needed graphic designers to whip up some images before the still-growing trend of NFTs really took off.

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Muniz immediately thought of Seneca’s chameleonic abilities. “She is one of the few artists who can actually draw differently depending on the subject matter and the project,” Muniz — who recently became co-CEO of Yuga Labs, the Web3 company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club — tells Rolling Stone . “That’s very, very, very rare.” Yuga Labs co-founder Gargamel says   he was struck by the “expressiveness” of her characters. “There’s a whole mood that gets conveyed,” he tells Rolling Stone  via email. “For the apes, we arrived at exactly the mood we were after: existential boredom.” Muniz agrees: “She’s particularly skilled at expression and bringing characters to life.”

Though Seneca wasn’t familiar with NFTs at the time, Yuga Labs gave her a lot of room to play in the collaboration. “They said, ‘We want punk apes. What do you think that would look like? What kind of style would you like? What do you think will look good?’” She imagined herself as an ape’s neighbor in a grungy city where the primates roam free as citizens. She saw “an ape that’s kind of jaded and tired of life but has all the money and time in the world, and hangs out at a metal bar” and ran through fictitious interactions with the creature. “That’s where that idea came from.”

Creating the apes’ aesthetic poured out of her naturally: A self-declared metalhead, Seneca plays a Gibson SG — which Muniz says she “slays” — and listens to bands like Megadeth, Behemoth, and Bullet for My Valentine. But she’s also a lover of Nineties gross-out animation, from which she drew inspiration. “I just love the grit of it all,” she says.

To be clear, Seneca was not the project’s sole illustrator. “I am the lead artist behind the original collection,” she says. The ape body itself, she adds, is “exactly line-for-line” her drawing. Other production artists — “Thomas Dagley, Migwashere, and a couple who chose to remain anonymous,” according to Gargamel — handled the traits and environment. However, she points out, she did develop some of the major traits, like the grinning mouth, the popping eyes, and the beanie.

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“Not of ton of people know that I did these drawings, which is terrible for an artist,” she says. Word of mouth has been growing, though, and she hopes that will help her find more collaborations. In the meantime, she’s focusing on her solo work.

In December, Seneca dropped her debut series of NFTs under her own name as part of a collection called Iconoclast at Miami’s Art Basel. The four pieces she contributed were minted on Ethereum and hosted on what’s called the Internet Computer blockchain. (Hosting the NFTs on the Internet Computer should ensure that the NFT artwork lives forever on a public blockchain without threat of a takedown or cloud-outage issues.)

The pieces ended up generating 23.7 ETH, which equates to about $84,000 at press time. She says it’s enough to pay the bills and then some, giving her the luxury of unadulterated time to craft her next series, which she hopes to unveil in February. Plus, she gets to unleash a mesmerizing personal style that’s been many years in the making and still evolving. “Her art is very evocative of a woman in progress,” says Ken Wong, an illustrator who art directed Seneca’s favorite video game, Alice: Madness Returns . (Wong met while he was working in Shanghai. Seneca approached him after he gave a speech about his profession at her high school; she says “he really introduced the world of illustration to [her].”) “If you were to label Seneca’s work, you could [call it] pop surrealism, but that might be a bit reductive… She’s exploring. She’s finding her voice amongst pre-existing voices. She’s evolving by trying on different art styles, and I can really relate to that.”

Despite technical shifts in her approach, her images often encapsulate a soft childlike wonder that contrasts a harsh, existential darkness. “It’s a combination of being very personal and very pop at the same time,” says Wong. “The shapes that she uses — these organic, flowing shapes are very dreamlike with surreal color schemes — I think they speak to how she views things deep inside her head. But, at the same time, it’s through a lens of pop culture. It’s almost like she’s trying to rationalize herself in the context of the world.”

That sentiment comes across quite literally in a piece called “Delirium” from the 2021 Art Basel collection, in which flora, fauna, and limbs bust out of the gaping eye sockets of a girl’s unnaturally oblong head. “That’s me being like, ‘You know, everything’s kind of fucking crazy, and that’s okay,” Seneca says. “That’s how your mind works.”

Another piece, titled “Can I Be M0ther,” shows the same girl. This time, though, her bug-like eyes appear pastel and prismatic as they shed thick, gloppy tears. It’s unclear whether veins, wires, or threads are slithering out of them. The strands fall, wrapping around her outstretched hands, which are cradling what appears to be a malfunctioning toy ape. “As a commercial artist, I saw myself as a kind of surrogate,” she explains. “Since art is such an emotionally charged extension of you, it’s deeply personal and, to a certain extent, you have to distance yourself from that work in order to give it away. That piece is very much me saying, ‘Can I reclaim my work? Can I reclaim my identity as an artist?’”

Part of that identity, Seneca says, is guided by the lucid nightmares that have plagued her from as far back as she can remember. Her earliest memory is a nightmare she had at three years old. “I was in a stroller,” she recalls. “I had this feeling of being small and vulnerable.” She doesn’t go into greater detail, but realizes those themes have consistently trickled their way through her work, which she says is inspired by cosmic horror — a genre wherein the crushing weight of being a small speck within the vast unknown is the most terrifying villain.

“I was more interested in being in my imagination than reality,” she says of her early years, noting that she kept to herself most of the time, was mute for the majority of her childhood, and sometimes experienced “wide-awake hallucinations.”

She remembers going through all her deepest fears before bedtime, thinking that if she addressed them head on, they wouldn’t pop up in her nightmares — but oftentimes that backfired, keeping her awake instead. “I didn’t want to sleep because I was terrified of this world I would jump into,” she says.

Only recently has Seneca come to accept “that madness part of it” — turning the “surrealism and non-sensical dark art” inside her into something beautiful, which she finds therapeutic. “It’s why I do what I do,” she says before admitting this isn’t something she shares with a lot of people for the fear of being considered “insane.”

Lucky for her, insanity, or some version of it, is welcome in Web3: Crypto couldn’t exist without an urge to deviate from the norm. She hopes the sector thrives for years to come. Her experience with the Bored Ape Yacht Club “taught [her] a lot of life lessons,” and she urges aspiring creators to make sure they understand NFTs and smart contracts, ask for royalties, and know the potential. “Be strong in your convictions and work extremely hard,” she says. “And be patient with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Things move very, very fast on crypto-Twitter and in this space. As long as you keep an eye on it, but pay no mind and just focus in your lane, you’ll do fine eventually.”

Of course, “fine” is relative. While she’s not able to discuss financial specifics, her compensation, she says, “was definitely not ideal.” However, she insists, she’s grateful for the experience and the entryway to a realm she can no longer imaging living without. She’s since fallen hard for the idea of NFTs, because they can authenticate and preserve art, provide creators with royalties, and make the art world more inclusive and less reliant on the gallery system.

She sees her second series — which she says will be digital but also involve other mediums — as an extension of the surrealist groundwork she’s laid, but bolder. She’s cagey in discussing works in progress but adds that she’s been putting emphasis on mental health and the power of strong women. The new work just might contain “a few criticisms,” too.

“I’m very optimistic about the space,” she says. “I’m using that as a driver.”

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Shovel Knight developers’ next game is a Zelda-like you play as a mouse

Mina the Hollower is inspired by the Game Boy Color era

by Ana Diaz

Yacht Club Games, the developer behind the Shovel Knight series , announced its next game at the Yacht Club Games Presents stream on Tuesday. The studio’s next title will be an original adventure inspired by the Game Boy Color. It’s called Mina the Hollower.

The game is still early in development, Yacht Club said, and the studio is seeking funding through a Kickstarter campaign that’s live now. “We want your feedback, collaboration, and support in making Mina the Hollower the best game it can possibly be,” the developers said.

The developers released a trailer alongside its Mina the Hollower reveal. In the game, you play as Mina, a mouse who fights her way through various dungeons using a whip and other items. Like Shovel Knight , Mina features an 8-bit art style — the game’s visuals look a lot like a souped-up version of the Game Boy Color game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening from 1993. The Kickstarter page says that the team plans create a game that runs in “smooth 60 [frames-per-second] action combat.”

Yacht Club released the indie darling Shovel Knight in 2014 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Since then, the iconic shovel-wielding knight has gone on to inspire a series of spinoffs games and sequels, and even get cameos in games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate . The team announced its other upcoming title, Shovel Knight Dig , in 2019. Yacht Club’s most recently released game, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon , was released in 2021 across multiple platforms.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club Creator Yuga Labs Acquires Rival NFT Company Proof

By Karen K. Ho

Karen K. Ho

Senior Writer, ARTnews

Yuga Labs , the web3 and lifestyle company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club , recently announced it had acquired rival non-fungible token creator Proof.

Proof is best known for Moonbirds, a collection of NFT profile pics known as PFPs . The Proof acquisition includes its team, intellectual property, and artistic portfolio, including the Oddities NFTs, Mythics PFPs, and Grails exhibition series.

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“As a company committed to championing art, culture, and community on the blockchain, we’re excited to have PROOF join the Yuga ecosystem,” Yuga Labs CEO Daniel Alegre said in a press statement. “Moonbirds is a collection with great potential and many unifying brand elements with Otherside. We look forward to PROOF Collective becoming an important part of our ongoing art and community engagement efforts.”

Last year, Proof collaborated with Pace Verso, Pace Gallery’s arm for web3 projects, on the NFT project “ Archive of Feelings ” by multidisciplinary artist Mika Tajima. The project was based on an existing series of large-scale installations by the artist.

According to a press release about the acquisition, Proof CEO and founder Kevin Rose “will undergo a brief handover period before becoming an advisor to the company” and said the two companies’ “will allow us to innovate faster and reach more people.”

It’s worth noting that just over four months ago, Yuga Labs announced layoffs for its US employees , with Alegre writing that Yuga Labs needed to “place our bets on fewer key initiatives” including going “all-in” on Otherside.

According to the Block , trading volumes of Proof’s celebrated Moonbirds collection of NFTs fell from $500 million in April 2022 to consistently below $5 million in monthly sales.

In an email, a spokesperson from said Yuga Labs the acquisition was an all-stock deal, with around 15 employees moving over, but declined to disclose the terms to ARTnews . Proof did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ARTnews .

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