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?
Appearance, story, setting, and style are all mostly secondary to the mechanics and design of the game.
Strip away the appearance of metroidvanias and you have a platforming maze with gated areas unlocked through progression.
The overall maze of the game should ideally be enough to get lost in. Whether the world is going to be procedurally generated or predesigned, or some combination should be figured out early on. Even if progression is linear the access to and pathway through the maze should likely not be a straight line. It is very common to see or view inaccessible late game areas in the early game, for example.
The gates of the game traditionally come in the form of new movement options. The reliables are usually: (double) jumping, running, slide/rolling, climbing, swimming/sinking, flying/gliding and so on. Choosing how and where the player may access these is important. This is to say: player movement is the game.
Another common ‘key’ to gates is something that allows the player to defeat an enemy or boss they could not previously defeat, or otherwise access a new area. A notable example being metroid’s ice beam. Freezing enemies gives the player new platforming options: and new movement in the game.
Good new metroidvanias are aware of what has been done before and try to innovate on those tropes.
But also, don’t fucking do what Metroid Dread did, and try to defeat sequence breaks. The Dread devs went out of their way to ruin speed runners’ experiences, by basically fighting against sequence breaks at every opportunity. Sequence breaks aren’t something the average player should be able to do accidentally, but don’t try to actively stop it either.
Maybe someone discovers that a particular platform normally requires a double jump to reach, but can be reached by kiting an enemy across the room and using some well-timed damage knockback to get a boost in height. This obviously isn’t intended gameplay, but it may be something that speed runners learn to do reliably, because getting the double jump ability adds 10 minutes to their route. Don’t fucking patch that out as soon as you learn about it, because you’ll just stifle any interest that speed runners have in your game. And in a decade, there’s a very good chance that the only people keeping your game relevant will be speed runners.
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Appearance, story, setting, and style are all mostly secondary to the mechanics and design of the game.
Strip away the appearance of metroidvanias and you have a platforming maze with gated areas unlocked through progression.
The overall maze of the game should ideally be enough to get lost in. Whether the world is going to be procedurally generated or predesigned, or some combination should be figured out early on. Even if progression is linear the access to and pathway through the maze should likely not be a straight line. It is very common to see or view inaccessible late game areas in the early game, for example.
The gates of the game traditionally come in the form of new movement options. The reliables are usually: (double) jumping, running, slide/rolling, climbing, swimming/sinking, flying/gliding and so on. Choosing how and where the player may access these is important. This is to say: player movement is the game.
Another common ‘key’ to gates is something that allows the player to defeat an enemy or boss they could not previously defeat, or otherwise access a new area. A notable example being metroid’s ice beam. Freezing enemies gives the player new platforming options: and new movement in the game.
Good new metroidvanias are aware of what has been done before and try to innovate on those tropes.
But also, don’t fucking do what Metroid Dread did, and try to defeat sequence breaks. The Dread devs went out of their way to ruin speed runners’ experiences, by basically fighting against sequence breaks at every opportunity. Sequence breaks aren’t something the average player should be able to do accidentally, but don’t try to actively stop it either.
Maybe someone discovers that a particular platform normally requires a double jump to reach, but can be reached by kiting an enemy across the room and using some well-timed damage knockback to get a boost in height. This obviously isn’t intended gameplay, but it may be something that speed runners learn to do reliably, because getting the double jump ability adds 10 minutes to their route. Don’t fucking patch that out as soon as you learn about it, because you’ll just stifle any interest that speed runners have in your game. And in a decade, there’s a very good chance that the only people keeping your game relevant will be speed runners.