Cyber Shadow, a recently published title from Yacht Club Games, is a 2D hack and slash platformer that draws inspiration from sidescrolling classics like Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man. Unlike Yacht Club Games' other titles, such as Shovel Knight, Cyber Shadow was mostly programmed by one single person. Aarne Hunziker, the sole developer at Mechanical Head Studios, worked on Cyber Shadow for about five years and collaborated with Yacht Club to bring it to digital storefronts.
Developing a game is already difficult enough for a team of hundreds of developers, but imagine how much of a challenge it is for a person to create a game like Cyber Shadow without a team by their side. Game Rant conducted an interview with the creator of Cyber Shadow and some details were brought up that go into the game's solo development and the pros and cons of that situation.
Game Rant asked Hunziker how the development process for Cyber Shadow was like with just one developer handling mostly everything and also the positives and negatives of not having a larger team of developers working on the project. He mentions that the process can be "daunting" and that one of the upsides is that he is "in control of every aspect" of Cyber Shadow:
"I need to jump between a lot of different seats which was daunting at first but became enjoyable later on. Can’t get bored of drawing pixel art when you need to do SFX, level design, and coding too. This leads to a downside, which is the velocity of progress is quite slow. Just handing over a sprite to a coder to do their magic would feel pretty liberating. The upside is that you are in control of every aspect and can make sure everything works as intended."
Of course, working on a project by one's self is sure to be a challenge, but the fact that every aspect of the video game is under the control of the creator is something that's unique in the gaming space. There are other exceptional titles out there that were created by one person like Undertale and Thomas Was Alone, and Cyber Shadow is sure to be added to the list of the best games made by a sole developer.
In the interview, Hunziker also discussed what it was like to work alongside a publisher such as Yacht Club Games. Fortunately, the collaboration between the two studios seems to have gone fairly well, with Hunziker mentioning that it felt like "working with friends."
"Felt more like working with friends than what I imagined a publisher/developer cooperation to be like. On top of handling the heavy lifting required to get the game translated and on every platform they also offered a ton of feedback."
This is one of the first times that Yacht Club Games has ever published a title that wasn't the studio's own, after publishing Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack back in 2016. It's nice to see that Mechanical Head and Yacht Club have a great relationship with one another. And considering that Cyber Shadow received mostly favorable reviews from critics, there's a chance that a sequel or a similar title could be in the works, especially since there's plenty of lore for Hunziker to use to flesh out the plot and characters.
Cyber Shadow is currently available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, and Xbox One.