Playing Mina blew my mind — then I talked to Yacht Club Games about making it
“Craft” in gaming can easily become synonymous with specular reflection — you know a team worked hard if the puddles in their AAA fantasy simulator glimmer like they would in real life. But if I’ve learned anything from talking to the team at Yacht Club Games this year, it’s that blood, sweat, tears, and the risk of financial ruin in the name of making cool-ass shit can often go overlooked in the context of, say, a Game Boy Color homage. But if we heralded Elden Ring for a synthesis of complex combat, rich lore, and demanding system work, then maybe we owe it to the folks at Yacht Club Games to recognize everything they pulled off in Mina the Hollower.
As GOTY talk ramps up and The Game Awards nominations draw near, I asked the folks at Yacht Club to answer a few variants of one basic question: How the hell did you think of this and stuff and how the hell did you pull it off? They kindly responded.
David D'Angelo, programmer at Yacht Club Games: Mina actually started with, Alec, the director, as a side project. He wanted to get better at doing art stuff. He said, “I'm gonna make a little game where I could make Game Boy Color art.
But when it came to us actually wanting to make the game, it started way more out of the mechanics perspective because we were interested in making a top-down game.
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