Yacht Club Games has released seven year's worth of production art from Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove under the Creative Commons license.
The studio said it hopes to be able to help developers working on their own projects, and was inspired to release the artwork after seeing a mystery dev working on a game jam title using Shovel Knight sprites as references.
"We love the idea of enabling other game devs. So, to that end, we are finally realizing one or our dreams by publishing the Treasure Trove: a nearly 1GB .zip containing all of the art from the seven years of production of Shovel Knight Treasure Trove," wrote the studio.
"1GB doesn’t sound like a lot in modern video game terms but it’s pixel art, these files are usually measured in kilobytes. It's huge and it's yours."
Yacht Club explained the Treasure Trove is a raw repository of assets including animations, backgrounds, menus, and more. It also includes project files and mockups alongside some cut content that's been "hidden away."
"We use a program called Pro Motion NG and all of the .flc and .pmp files can be opened with that. You can find Promotion NG here," continued the studio, explaining how to access certain files.
"Good luck, treasure hunters, we hope you enjoy digging through the art archives and can’t wait to see how this enables you to make your own games in the future."
The Treasure Trove is available to download right now (zip file).