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Haosima @lemm.ee

New metroidvania

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?

31 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

31 comments