When Shovel Knight launched, it took the gaming world by storm with its sexy controls and glorious difficulty. Now, with its European release approaching (and recent Street Pass update), developer Yacht Club details the titles future.

In an interview with Nintendo Europe, designer/director Sean Velasco opened up about upcoming updates, new characters and more, including a gender-swap mode.

Add-on content is already being planned; that was from the crowd funding campaign. Here’s what’s happening with all the update content! Every three to four months, we want to drop a new update after the initial release of the game: we’re going to have playable campaigns featuring Plague Knight, King Knight and Spectre Knight, in their own campaign with their own story. The gameplay will be 95% the same, but it’s going to be a big thing.

Then we have a challenge mode, which is going to be a series of small challenges that are very difficult, or that ramp up in difficulty so that when you finish them you’re like, “I’m the best Shovel Knight player ever!” We’re going to do a gender-swap mode, so all the male characters will become female and vice versa; we’ll probably have checkmarks where you can just tick what you want. Last but not least, we’re going to do a four-player couch battle mode. That’s only on Wii U! It’ll feature Shovel Knight, all the Order of No Quarter, all the bosses, all the characters.

For the handful of recently awakened coma patients unfamiliar with Shovel Knight, it's an 8-bit trip down a smooth nostalgia highway, featuring simple mechanics (move, jump and shovel) and increasingly challenging levels, a la Mega Man. The game is available now on 3DS, Wii U and PC.