Hey, hi everyone. We here at IronRaven decided to make a metroidvania, in the style of Dieselpunk and the 20s, art deco, art nouveau and so on. Tell me, what is the most important thing for you in metroidvanias, besides their appearance?
Flow. Don’t interrupt me. The rest of this just is about it in various aspects.
Make it feel good to move from the get go. Don’t make progression about getting rid of negative traits.
Combat as well. There’s a trend of making the player halt their progress to handle an enemy in a certain way (e.g. gotta wait for the telegraphed shield drop) and that makes backtracking and exploration tedious. It can be challenging going through the first time, but don’t interrupt me with the same thing over and over. Let me ignore the puzzle/timing element by being overpowered or at least let me bypass it with increased mobility.
I prefer bosses (and terrain) that can be overcome with skill or preparation. Like if you book it to them with minimal exploration they’re hard but not impossible, but if you explore everywhere you can and find everything it should be easier. Don’t artificially keep the player’s abilities capped to make things more difficult. Also, no invincibility phases, please.
I dislike items that only provide access like key cards. Every item that opens up more map should be useful in some other way.
If there’s a plot that is more complicated than can be explained in two sentences (Find the Metroid. Kill Dracula.), please make it good. Have non-cliche characters, plots that I can’t immediately poke holes in, plot that isn’t contained in logs that real people would never keep, and reasonable time frames for world changing events to occur. Those things all rip my suspension of disbelief to shreds. Don’t make me sit through world building info dumps. Let me skip scenes and tutorials in case it’s my second time through.
Adding to zero’s post, you can see most of these things in Castlevania SotN. There are very few times you’re stopped to have some dialogue and it never lasts more than a minute. There is one key item to open one door, everything else you’re supposed to explore whenever you acquire the proper skill (high jump, bat form, mist form)
Don’t be afraid of putting most content “out of the way”, away from the main path. Be sure to leave a number of “you need this power/skill” places around the “main intended path”, so the player might have that “aha!” moment when they get a new skill. \
Speaking of skills, don’t make them useful only at super specific places or situations. Give many places for them to be used and abused. “But this is too OP” - just put some situations where it’s not as OP, rather than giving a nerf that makes nobody use it outside the mandatory places. Mist form in SotN makes you invulnerable, super OP, right? Have fun in this long ass corridor (where wolf form shines, instead)
Personally, I much prefer tutorials to be optional, like you have to manually select the “tutorial” menu option.
Sotn and Super Metroid are definitely ones I have in mind when it comes to positive examples. Axiom Verge is pretty darn good, too.
Other decent ones include AM2R, Bladechimera, Guacamelee, the NES’s Blaster Master, and most of the Castlevania/Bloodstained ones.
Negative examples below:
Metroid Dread - I hated the stealth and the qte
Ender Lilies - bosses are meant to happen at exactly one difficulty
Gestalt Steam and Cinder - puzzley enemies that grind movement to a halt, bosses with immunity phases, the stun mechanic for bosses that meant more cycles if you didn’t gain enough meter or miss your shot, absolutely bonkers plot, artificial barriers to character power
Hollow Knight - this is a platformer first and a motroidvania second. No flow for me, thought I understand that so many people love it. Ori feels like this as well. An some point, both were just about not hitting spikes.
Wonder Labyrinth - the aiming
All the Shantae games. I really enjoy them except when there’s bottomless pits. And there’s always bottomless pits.
There were also a few that weren’t bad, just didn’t quite catch me: Vernal Edge, 9 Years of Shadows, Timespinner.
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Flow. Don’t interrupt me. The rest of this just is about it in various aspects.
Make it feel good to move from the get go. Don’t make progression about getting rid of negative traits.
Combat as well. There’s a trend of making the player halt their progress to handle an enemy in a certain way (e.g. gotta wait for the telegraphed shield drop) and that makes backtracking and exploration tedious. It can be challenging going through the first time, but don’t interrupt me with the same thing over and over. Let me ignore the puzzle/timing element by being overpowered or at least let me bypass it with increased mobility.
I prefer bosses (and terrain) that can be overcome with skill or preparation. Like if you book it to them with minimal exploration they’re hard but not impossible, but if you explore everywhere you can and find everything it should be easier. Don’t artificially keep the player’s abilities capped to make things more difficult. Also, no invincibility phases, please.
I dislike items that only provide access like key cards. Every item that opens up more map should be useful in some other way.
If there’s a plot that is more complicated than can be explained in two sentences (Find the Metroid. Kill Dracula.), please make it good. Have non-cliche characters, plots that I can’t immediately poke holes in, plot that isn’t contained in logs that real people would never keep, and reasonable time frames for world changing events to occur. Those things all rip my suspension of disbelief to shreds. Don’t make me sit through world building info dumps. Let me skip scenes and tutorials in case it’s my second time through.
Adding to zero’s post, you can see most of these things in Castlevania SotN. There are very few times you’re stopped to have some dialogue and it never lasts more than a minute. There is one key item to open one door, everything else you’re supposed to explore whenever you acquire the proper skill (high jump, bat form, mist form)
Don’t be afraid of putting most content “out of the way”, away from the main path. Be sure to leave a number of “you need this power/skill” places around the “main intended path”, so the player might have that “aha!” moment when they get a new skill. \
Speaking of skills, don’t make them useful only at super specific places or situations. Give many places for them to be used and abused. “But this is too OP” - just put some situations where it’s not as OP, rather than giving a nerf that makes nobody use it outside the mandatory places. Mist form in SotN makes you invulnerable, super OP, right? Have fun in this long ass corridor (where wolf form shines, instead)
Personally, I much prefer tutorials to be optional, like you have to manually select the “tutorial” menu option.
Sotn and Super Metroid are definitely ones I have in mind when it comes to positive examples. Axiom Verge is pretty darn good, too.
Other decent ones include AM2R, Bladechimera, Guacamelee, the NES’s Blaster Master, and most of the Castlevania/Bloodstained ones.
Negative examples below:
Metroid Dread - I hated the stealth and the qte
Ender Lilies - bosses are meant to happen at exactly one difficulty
Gestalt Steam and Cinder - puzzley enemies that grind movement to a halt, bosses with immunity phases, the stun mechanic for bosses that meant more cycles if you didn’t gain enough meter or miss your shot, absolutely bonkers plot, artificial barriers to character power
Hollow Knight - this is a platformer first and a motroidvania second. No flow for me, thought I understand that so many people love it. Ori feels like this as well. An some point, both were just about not hitting spikes.
Wonder Labyrinth - the aiming
All the Shantae games. I really enjoy them except when there’s bottomless pits. And there’s always bottomless pits.
There were also a few that weren’t bad, just didn’t quite catch me: Vernal Edge, 9 Years of Shadows, Timespinner.