Famous for the Kickstarter hit Shovel Knight, Yacht Club Games is proving the power of crowdfunding again with its ambitious follow-up Mina the Hollower. This new top-down action-RPG, inspired by the Game Boy Color aesthetic, has used the Kickstarter platform to build both funding and a strong community.
Mina the Hollower represents a significant shift for the studio, moving away from the linear 8-bit side-scrolling model of Shovel Knight to an open-world action-RPG. The game draws heavily on the freeform exploration of classic The Legend of Zelda titles, such as Link’s Awakening DX, but injects a tense atmosphere reminiscent of FromSoftware’s Bloodborne.
Studio founder and game director Sean Velasco in an interview with Game Developer noted that this transition has been challenging. While Shovel Knight benefited from the strict constraints of NES-style design, Mina the Hollower’s Game Boy Color-era aesthetic offers fewer limitations, forcing the team to invent more of their own rules. “The screen is smaller, so there is less space to work with. Crafting every screen became a little puzzle we had to solve,” Velasco said.
The game focuses on the protagonist Mina who uses various weapons and can burrow underground to overcome foes and puzzles across an island in turmoil. Compared to the course progression of its predecessor, Mina features a more open overworld with towns and dungeons that can be explored in any order. The game is a notably dense experience, with Velasco estimating a full playthrough could take around 30 hours.
Velasco explained that for a game of this scale, which is their largest to date, Kickstarter served a dual purpose. It provided a portion of the budget, but more importantly, it functioned as a powerful marketing and community-building tool in 2025.
“The game is not entirely funded through Kickstarter. It was a portion of the budget, but it was also a marketing and community-building tool,” Velasco stated. He highlighted the campaign’s success in quickly funding and creating an enthusiastic community, noting that the experience was much smoother than the original Shovel Knight campaign a decade ago, where they famously “overpromised and were literally packing boxes of dirt ourselves.”
Studio founder also said that crowdfunding remains the perfect fit for retro-inspired games, which often cater to niche audiences: “Retro-inspired games fit perfectly there. Crowdfunding shines a spotlight on them and helps them break into the mainstream.”
