The announcement was made precisely in a post Kickstarter. Yacht Club Games wanted to be generous – very generous – and therefore decided to share more of the development files of Shovel Knight in the form of a simple zip file, which looks like a real treasure chest. Weighing 1.30 GB, this folder entitled “TreasureTrove_AllArt” contains icons, mockups, images, and gifs from the seven years of development of this flagship title. A gold mine for young developers, especially for apprentice animators, this zip folder containing many files in .FLC, a format for animation software like ProMotion.
In this announcement, the studio explains that the idea came to them in 2013, after seeing photos of a game jam where a developer was using sprites from Shovel Knight as a reference for its own game. With the idea of helping other creators, Yacht Club Games has therefore shared this file under Creative Commons, ie a non-commercial license. “Good luck treasure hunters, we hope you enjoy digging through the art archive and look forward to seeing how it will help you create your own games in the future.“, concludes Yacht Club Games.