Shovel Knight Will be in Yooka-Laylee

Shovel Knight will be a guest character in the upcoming Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor.

The Shovel Knight is arguably one of the best new characters of the past couple years, appearing in Yacht Club Game’s incredible retro-platforming throwback, Shovel Knight. He’s been so popular that Nintendo even gave him his own amiibo. In fact, Playtronic Games, developer of Banjo-Kazooie franchise spiritual successor Yooka-Laylee, liked the character so much that it teamed up with Yacht Club to add him as a guest NPC.

In the new trailer just shown at a developer panel at EGX this year, many of the game’s NPC characters are shown off. Shovel Knight appears right at the end, speaking in a kind of strange mumbling voice. Apparently, after receiving an explanation and practicing on a Skype call, Yacht Club went through the steps of how Playtonic creates the mumbling voices, and the result was added to the title directly.

Playtronic said that Shovel Knight was a “much-loved game” with a team that “shares the same kinds of values we do as developers and has created something fantastic in the past”.

The studio indicated that Shovel Knight was the only “guest” character that had been added to the game so far, but is open to more ideas.

Yooka-Laylee is currently scheduled for release on PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Wii U and Xbox One in March, 2017.

Source: Playtronic Games