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?
Too many metroidvanias have abilities that work more like keys - they open a door that gives access to a new area of the game. A better ability is something that changes how the game fundementally plays, or makes old areas feel fresh.
Starting the game with sufficient movement is a big one. Hollow Knight starts with too few movement abilities, and the beginning is slow.
If we’re going to take a Metroidvania as an example of this lesson, let’s take Environmental Station Alpha. The game has a ton of potential as a good Metroidvania that is buried in a thick armor of speedrunner-level difficulty. I have never seen a Metroidvania be so stingy about health tanks, and this game desperately needs all of the health tanks you can get. It stinks of a developer team playtesting the hell out of their own game, and making difficulty decisions based on years of their own self-testing experience.
When you release a game with a Normal difficulty, no Hard difficulty, and then are forced to create a Easy difficulty after release, you know you’ve fucked up.
Here’s how you do it: You can playtest your own game, but that one gets the “Hard” label. If you playtest for a Normal difficulty and you can’t imagine how to create a Hard difficulty, the difficulty range is completely off. And Hard doesn’t mean “only people in the double-digits can beat it”. That’s not even a scale, or just reserve that for some “Impossible” difficulty, if you want to get to 5-6 levels, like Doom does.
Normal should be some reasonable setting based on how others playtest the game. Get some expectations from your playtest audience in terms of the kinds of games they’ve played and beat before. Are they complete noobs to any sort of fast-paced gameplay, or have they beaten other Metroidvanias or games like Cuphead? Based on that, figure out whether the advice they give you applies to an Easy or Normal difficulty curve.
You can’t just, independently, as a single person, “have your own game engine”. It has to be designed for a specific type of game, with a specific style. You don’t have the time or resources to develop one that is an omnibus toolbox.
Even then, people should be using Godot now, especially indie developers. Spend the time and resources enriching an existing open-source game engine.
Aside from the obvious things mentioned about flow, maps, immersion, etc., and to address some of the other things I’ve seen in the comments: configurability. Realize that not everyone will have the same physical abilities, skill, and/or time to play. Give options to people who want to tweak things to be more difficult and likewise for those who want it easier and more accessible.
Don’t make dying harder than it has to. I really hate the mechanic in Hollow Knight where you had to go back to the place you died and battle your shade. It’s extremely punishing and unfun (for me). Compare that with Ori where, when you die, there is no extra penalty and the reload is almost instant, so you immediately get to go again. It keeps me in the flow.
For that same reason, bosses should only have a grand entrance, cut scene, etc once. When I die and go again I want to immediately fight him, I don’t want to have to sit through the same scene 30 times just because I suck. Not even if it’s just 5 seconds long. So, second time make sure the boss is spawned and waiting.
Hollow Knight is one of the GOATs because it’s hard, but extremely fair. Learn the patterns, and any boss can be beaten hitless; explore properly, and any boss can be returned to rematch – after a death – from a bench in 1 to 2 screens (late game even has a teleport ability!).
There’s plenty of moments in hollow night where it can be way more than just 3 screens. Especially when you’re exploring places for the first time and doing know where the next bench will be (I felt like there was no way near enough benches too).
It’s what made me eventually drop the game. I didn’t find it hard, I just could not be arsed. Felt like a waste of time when I’ve got so many other games bI could be playing instead of playing the same 10-15 minutes of gameplay over and over again.
I love metroidvanias too. One of my favourite genres.
I mean it happened to me a few times when exploring. I don’t know the names of the places. It was still kinda early on. I think the messy place I tried to enter was the mushroom place? And i kept dying in there then had to travel what felt like half of a full zone to get back there because i had yet to find a bench in there.
Then it would be a game I never touch; when there’s no other way to learn than by dying, your game has failed in my opinion. I shouldn’t have to beat my head against some pattern that I can’t discover through lore or elsewhere in the game. I’m in my 40s and used to game competitively in the early 2000s, FWIW.
If it’s going to have some kind of inventory system… figure out a way to prevent players from hoarding high-value items until the end of the game, at which point they are either meaningless because you’re so leveled up, or else you can trivially defeat the final boss by spamming all the holy hand grenades you’ve been socking away.
I never completed Breath of the Wild in large part due to getting something cool and just having it be worthless and broken soon after. I also tend to have very little time to devote to gaming so it just felt like a waste to have to stop, go hunt down something better than randomStickLevel3, and go back to do something again.
If I wanna hoard things or risk a lot to get something cool/strong early, that’s my decision; why do you get to dictate how I play a game? Especially true when some people may not have the same physical ability as you and need to make certain situations play out differently.
BOTW took the item breakage too far. You couldn’t even kill a Lynel with its own weapon, because it would break before the Lynel died. The durability could have been quadrupled, and the game would have been better. It would still be enough to encourage rotating your items, but not so much that you’re constantly swapping mid-fight.
But also, be sure to eventually post about them somewhere. Don’t do the whole “devs left this secret in the game that was so obscure and difficult to find that it wasn’t discovered for 20 years” BS.
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.
That Prince of Persia Metroidvania that came out a couple years ago had a very useful feature where you can not only make custom marks on your map, it also attaches a screenshot to the marker that pops up when you hover over it.
Super useful, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it used in other Metroidvania games…
Also, not even sure what specifically, but more games should be like Animal Well. So… Just do that lol
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.
A map made of blue rectangles with white outlines joking, saw quite enough of those already.
A pet peeve of mine : a new ability should not be used to just go through one or two obstacles and never again. Best case is it has potential uses outside the ability gates, for example it gives you new moves or options you can exploit in combat and such. Because if not it may as well be just an ordinary key, and though it’s okay to have a couple locks and keys in your game, your new “power” being reduced to that is frustrating.
As an example of what not to do IMO, there’s an item called the Spinner, a cogwheel machine you can ride in The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess. It looks crazy and cool as fuck… And you use it 3 times in the whole game, because it works on rails, there are very few rails and it’s completely useless everywhere else. Boo.
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Too many metroidvanias have abilities that work more like keys - they open a door that gives access to a new area of the game. A better ability is something that changes how the game fundementally plays, or makes old areas feel fresh.
Starting the game with sufficient movement is a big one. Hollow Knight starts with too few movement abilities, and the beginning is slow.
Please, playtest with unexperienced players
Absolutely this.
If we’re going to take a Metroidvania as an example of this lesson, let’s take Environmental Station Alpha. The game has a ton of potential as a good Metroidvania that is buried in a thick armor of speedrunner-level difficulty. I have never seen a Metroidvania be so stingy about health tanks, and this game desperately needs all of the health tanks you can get. It stinks of a developer team playtesting the hell out of their own game, and making difficulty decisions based on years of their own self-testing experience.
When you release a game with a Normal difficulty, no Hard difficulty, and then are forced to create a Easy difficulty after release, you know you’ve fucked up.
Here’s how you do it: You can playtest your own game, but that one gets the “Hard” label. If you playtest for a Normal difficulty and you can’t imagine how to create a Hard difficulty, the difficulty range is completely off. And Hard doesn’t mean “only people in the double-digits can beat it”. That’s not even a scale, or just reserve that for some “Impossible” difficulty, if you want to get to 5-6 levels, like Doom does.
Normal should be some reasonable setting based on how others playtest the game. Get some expectations from your playtest audience in terms of the kinds of games they’ve played and beat before. Are they complete noobs to any sort of fast-paced gameplay, or have they beaten other Metroidvanias or games like Cuphead? Based on that, figure out whether the advice they give you applies to an Easy or Normal difficulty curve.
Contact me in private if you need a programmer. I have my own game engine, but I’m willing to work with other engines.
You can’t just, independently, as a single person, “have your own game engine”. It has to be designed for a specific type of game, with a specific style. You don’t have the time or resources to develop one that is an omnibus toolbox.
Even then, people should be using Godot now, especially indie developers. Spend the time and resources enriching an existing open-source game engine.
Game engine optimized for retro pixelart aesthetics written in D go BRRR
It’s written in Brainfuck, but it’s really really good. Trust me, bro!
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer specialized engines over the current trend of engines being made to do almost anything out of the box.
Also D is not like Brainfuck, but C if it was designed well (and had optional memory safety).
Aside from the obvious things mentioned about flow, maps, immersion, etc., and to address some of the other things I’ve seen in the comments: configurability. Realize that not everyone will have the same physical abilities, skill, and/or time to play. Give options to people who want to tweak things to be more difficult and likewise for those who want it easier and more accessible.
Don’t make dying harder than it has to. I really hate the mechanic in Hollow Knight where you had to go back to the place you died and battle your shade. It’s extremely punishing and unfun (for me). Compare that with Ori where, when you die, there is no extra penalty and the reload is almost instant, so you immediately get to go again. It keeps me in the flow.
For that same reason, bosses should only have a grand entrance, cut scene, etc once. When I die and go again I want to immediately fight him, I don’t want to have to sit through the same scene 30 times just because I suck. Not even if it’s just 5 seconds long. So, second time make sure the boss is spawned and waiting.
Counter to this: Don’t cater to noobs.
Hollow Knight is one of the GOATs because it’s hard, but extremely fair. Learn the patterns, and any boss can be beaten hitless; explore properly, and any boss can be returned to rematch – after a death – from a bench in 1 to 2 screens (late game even has a teleport ability!).
There’s plenty of moments in hollow night where it can be way more than just 3 screens. Especially when you’re exploring places for the first time and doing know where the next bench will be (I felt like there was no way near enough benches too).
It’s what made me eventually drop the game. I didn’t find it hard, I just could not be arsed. Felt like a waste of time when I’ve got so many other games bI could be playing instead of playing the same 10-15 minutes of gameplay over and over again.
I love metroidvanias too. One of my favourite genres.
Name them. I’d be happy to counter.
I mean it happened to me a few times when exploring. I don’t know the names of the places. It was still kinda early on. I think the messy place I tried to enter was the mushroom place? And i kept dying in there then had to travel what felt like half of a full zone to get back there because i had yet to find a bench in there.
Then it would be a game I never touch; when there’s no other way to learn than by dying, your game has failed in my opinion. I shouldn’t have to beat my head against some pattern that I can’t discover through lore or elsewhere in the game. I’m in my 40s and used to game competitively in the early 2000s, FWIW.
If it’s going to have some kind of inventory system… figure out a way to prevent players from hoarding high-value items until the end of the game, at which point they are either meaningless because you’re so leveled up, or else you can trivially defeat the final boss by spamming all the holy hand grenades you’ve been socking away.
I never completed Breath of the Wild in large part due to getting something cool and just having it be worthless and broken soon after. I also tend to have very little time to devote to gaming so it just felt like a waste to have to stop, go hunt down something better than randomStickLevel3, and go back to do something again.
If I wanna hoard things or risk a lot to get something cool/strong early, that’s my decision; why do you get to dictate how I play a game? Especially true when some people may not have the same physical ability as you and need to make certain situations play out differently.
BOTW took the item breakage too far. You couldn’t even kill a Lynel with its own weapon, because it would break before the Lynel died. The durability could have been quadrupled, and the game would have been better. It would still be enough to encourage rotating your items, but not so much that you’re constantly swapping mid-fight.
Secrets. Secrets everywhere.
But also, be sure to eventually post about them somewhere. Don’t do the whole “devs left this secret in the game that was so obscure and difficult to find that it wasn’t discovered for 20 years” BS.
leave out the unskippable cut scenes… lookin’ at you, metroid fusion.
Responsive controls, a functional map, rewarding exploration
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.
That Prince of Persia Metroidvania that came out a couple years ago had a very useful feature where you can not only make custom marks on your map, it also attaches a screenshot to the marker that pops up when you hover over it.
Super useful, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it used in other Metroidvania games…
Also, not even sure what specifically, but more games should be like Animal Well. So… Just do that lol
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.
A map made of blue rectangles with white outlinesjoking, saw quite enough of those already.A pet peeve of mine : a new ability should not be used to just go through one or two obstacles and never again. Best case is it has potential uses outside the ability gates, for example it gives you new moves or options you can exploit in combat and such. Because if not it may as well be just an ordinary key, and though it’s okay to have a couple locks and keys in your game, your new “power” being reduced to that is frustrating.
As an example of what not to do IMO, there’s an item called the Spinner, a cogwheel machine you can ride in The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess. It looks crazy and cool as fuck… And you use it 3 times in the whole game, because it works on rails, there are very few rails and it’s completely useless everywhere else. Boo.
Strong female protagonist
Glib sense of humour
Abundant reference to potatoes
Are we remaking Attack on Titan?