Author Archives: rmtsukuru

Minimalist Metroidvania: Basics

For all 2 of you that are reading this and wondering what “Daily Game Design” is, let me briefly explain. Basically, I feel like I’ve had less motivation for game development lately, and a not-insignificant cause of this issue is that I haven’t been thinking about ideas for games in my spare time.

To help get back into this habit and make it more reliable and consistent, I’d like to start writing short posts on game design everyday to get those creative juices flowing. They won’t be very long and they probably won’t be particularly great, but they should at least be interesting. Plus, it’ll finally get some regular content up on this sorry excuse for a blog. Anyway, let’s dive into it.

Today’s Topic: Minimalist Metroidvania Gameplay

The Metroidvania genre generally consists of games with large, sprawling world that are packed to the gills with different areas, enemies, bosses, upgrades, and secrets. For a novice developer, though, this scale is a bit daunting, and definitely somewhat over-ambitious. To come up with a way to make this sort of game feasible as a basic hobby project, I’m going to try to identify the key elements of the design and then strip them down to pure essentials. If relevant, I’ll also be listing design choices where tradeoffs need to be made to keep the scope low.

Key Elements of the Metroidvania Genre

Side-scrolling: This is somewhat nitpicky but I think needs to be stated outright. Running and jumping make up the bulk of the most of these games, and are a large component of what makes them fun. There are similar types of games that use a different perspective, but for my purposes I’d like to focus on platformers.
Focus on Combat: A lot of side-scrollers place a lot of emphasis on accurately-timed jumps and precise platforming across bottomless pits, but Metroidvanias generally focus on dangers that the player can fight off. Some environmental hazards (e.g. spikes, lava, etc.) may be present, but in general falling off a ledge does not lead to instant death. This reduces the player’s concern of messing up a jump, allowing them to concentrate on maneuvering around enemies and managing resources.
Exploration: The player should be rewarded for going off the beaten path and investing time to find hidden things. This is probably the most critical part of the experience: even if there are a bunch of upgrades available, if they’re all mandatory and acquired in a totally linear fashion, player freedom isn’t entering into the equation.
Item-based Progression: Whether through big upgrades like new abilities and weapons or small power-ups like boosts to max HP/ammo capacity, there are things players can find in the field to permanently improve their capabilities. For a small game, we’ll have to rely primarily on the latter.
Non-linear Progression: The player should have several options for locations to visit, at least by the mid-way point of the game. Even if most players stick to the critical path, they should have the freedom to venture off it if they so desire. This requires several different areas to properly accomplish, though, so it’s not as feasible for a small game without cutting back on other features.
Bosses: At the end of most areas, there is a single challenging enemy that cannot be avoided (generally speaking) and the player must defeat. Boss monsters aren’t restricted to Metroidvanias, but they’re definitely a staple of the genre. For a small game, there’s probably not room for more than one boss, but that only makes it an extra opportunity to be a greater, more exciting challenge than the regular enemies.

This gives us a rough list of what’s needed to make a Metroidvania-style game. In particular, for a small scope it looks like the best approach is to create a combat-focused platformer that has a single area with a boss at the end. The level will be mostly linear by necessity, but there will be several “pockets” at various points branching off from the main path that contain hidden upgrades (max HP boosts, max ammo/resource boosts, maybe even damage or defense buffs).

This will be simple enough to be manageable with a small scope, but still meaty enough to be a satisfying and challenging experience for the player. There are other ways I could have broken this down, such as stripping down the combat mechanics and/or boss to focus on a maze with non-linear exploration and lock-and-key upgrade advancement (c.f. Knytt Stories or You Have to Win the Game), but for this project I want to try my hand at an action-platformer. Tomorrow I’ll start hashing out the details for how this particular game will work.

Gather Released

Leave a reply

After several months working on it (and no time spent blogging about it, because I didn't realize I just needed to restart the server to get this blog up and running again), my first game, "Gather", is complete! You can download it and see screenshots here. It's currently available for Windows and Linux (Mac version coming soon - I just need a Mac computer to build it, since Processing requires that for some reason). I won't be putting up a full post-mortem right this moment, but will probably revisit at some point in the future.

For now, I'm hoping to move on to building new projects. The next one is small, so it should be done by the end of February, but it's going to be something interesting - even artistic, after a fashion. Check back here for any and all updates.

Anomaly and Character Vignettes

Leave a reply

I haven't really made any progress on this project over the past 2 months (DMing has eaten into my creative time a lot), but I've still been thinking about it quite a bit. As usual, after some analysis I realized that there were still some serious issues with the initial concept.

I had originally been planning to have the game take place over a relatively large environment composed of multiple separate areas for the player to explore, which would comprise several hours of playtime in total. It's clear now that this was still a little too ambitious in scope. Even starting the iteration process with a short and sweet demo, this project would be a rather large undertaking compared to my prior development experience (which is to say, practically nothing). So I'm taking things down a peg and trying to fit the whole game into an hour-long experience, tops. Making arbitrary decisions like this won't be enough by itself to get me making regular progress, but it definitely makes for a more manageable goal in the abstract.

Helpful or no, I've also decided to finally give the game a working title: Anomaly. With the Giger Counter (a weirdness detector of sorts) at the player's fingertips from the get-go, this name seems like the perfect fit for a small, quirky adventure in which the protagonist is attempting to uncover a bizarre mystery.

On the positive side, though, I've been feeling very inspired lately where it comes to the background for this game. I've been throwing around ideas in my head for characters, stories, etc. set in this world for a couple years now, but haven't committed most of it to paper, much less in a released form. So I'd like to use this blog as an outlet for writing these concepts down and doing a little light brainstorming, for posterity if nothing else. For now, here's a list of vignettes describing some of the characters inhabiting this world. Not all will be relevant or even make an appearance in Anomaly, but I think all of them are interesting in some way and have potential to appear in a future game or story.

Sybil "Syb" Ganesh

While struggling to complete her PhD in physics at the University of Chicago, Syb stumbles on a means of travel between parallel universes in the course of her research on gravitation waves. Armed with a passion for exploration, scientific ingenuity, and an understanding of the magnitude of this discovery, she quickly delves into its mysteries as part of a secret government research project. This wasn't quite the independent investigation she dreamed of as a child, but she pursues it with her trademark enthusiasm nonetheless. In college, Syb was friends with Nic and roommates with Emily, but she's lost touch with both of them since finishing grad school.

Nicodemus "Nic" Gutiérrez

Nic is an electrical engineer by profession, and a talented one at that, but he doesn't care for formal designations; pulling pranks, making sarcastic remarks, and finding ways to get out of doing work are more his drift. If you can get him excited about a project, though, he'll gladly stay up all night to get it working, even if it has to be hacked together at the last minute. It's getting him motivated that's the hard part. He's currently trying to deal with the fact that not only might government conspiracies be real, but his close friends Sybil and Emily might have been hiding the truth from him for years.

Emily Mason

Emily is an expert on organic chemistry, statistics, philosophy, mathematics, evolutionary psychology, and economics, and she won't let anyone forget it. For this reason she usually declines to comment on most people's everyday affairs, but when she does deign to speak you can be sure it will be a deep, enlightening piece of advice about how you're utterly failing to meet her standards of quality. Other than that she mostly keeps her thoughts, goals, and occupation to herself. Emily used to live with Sybil, but nobody's heard from her in a long time.

Jeremy Eckbert

A freelance investigative journalist who tracks down stories no one else is willing to cover, Jeremy is relentless in his drive to dig up the truth even if it's not strictly legal to acquire it. This brings risks and complications in disseminating that information, especially when the job amounts to spying on the government, but it also brings buyers willing to pay well for someone else to get their hands dirty. The vagrant nature of his line of work has totally tanked his social life, though. His only frequent contact is Ava, who he collaborates with in order to gather data digitally.

Ava Thompson

While trying and failing to give a shit about high school, Ava discovered that she was already good at educating herself about something: hacking. After seeing that she could make money off of her talent for computing, she dropped out and started doing odd jobs on the web full time. Her analytical acuity and disrespect for authority often risked getting her into trouble, but it also connected her with a number of like-minded individuals also feeling oppressed by the intrusive, murky identity of the US government as of late. She often works with Jeremy and is currently dating Odette.

Odette Asadi

As stubborn as she is elegant, Odette is a firm believer in the power of governance and diplomacy to effect change. With her fierce, charismatic demeanor, well-educated background, and no-nonsense attitude, she's a natural fit for leadership roles. While originally from France, she's currently studying international relations and political science at Columbia University in hopes of working for the EU or UN in the future. Despite their many differences, she and Ava have had a steady relationship for nearly three years.

Minimalist Game Design Brainstorming

Leave a reply

With the new year fast approaching, I feel an urge to create something new. Now that I'm done with my undergrad and have my work situation settled for the moment, it's a great opportunity to reinvent myself and put my free time towards a creative endeavor. In short, I want to take a proper stab at making a simple computer game.

For the past couple years I've had a number of ideas rolling around in my head, but haven't really had the opportunity to pursue any of them. As usual, most were hideously out of the realistic scope of my abilities, both quantitatively and qualitatively. My interest is in making narrative-based games, but I've too often used that as a crutch to build out long, plot-heavy concepts instead of focusing on practical, resource-independent game design. This time, I want to come up with a solid set of mechanics and fit the story around them, not the other way around.

To accomplish this, I'd like to draw on some core mechanics from the Metroidvania genre. Specifically, the game will be designed as a top-down adventure wherein the player is mostly limited to a linear progression, but will be tricked by exploration-driving incentives into thinking they discovered where to go on their own, ala Super Metroid. This, combined with simple inventory-based lock and key puzzles, a dynamically-updated map to track progress, and some fetch quests (e.g. collect A, B, and C to open this door) will make up the majority of the gameplay. Some light combat, puzzles, or narrative choices might figure in where appropriate, but they won't be the central focus. The key motivators and aesthetics being targeted here are exploration and basic problem solving.

I figured that the most effective approach to telling a story around this concept would be to make it contigent, as much as possible, on the player's decision to buy into it. The idea already lended itself to an "uncovering mysterious backstory in the middle of nowhere" scenario in my head, so it's a natural progression to put most of the narrative being revealed into documents that the player is trying to find. An image came together of the PC as a freelance investigative journalist seeking answers to reports of a secret government facility conducting mysterious, inhumane experiments. But there's no need to talk too much about him in-game. In fact, most of the core narrative, stored in reports and files recovered by the protagonist, can be skipped by players that just want to complete their mission. I expect that many will be intrigued by the (brief) opening hook and want to figure out the explanation for everything, but even those uninterested in the story aren't forced to engaged with it and, in fact, still get rewarded in-game for collecting everything (again, see the Metroid series and its end-of-game collection % count).

Anyways, the rest of design details can be worked out once I've got a working prototype together. I already own DLS to Game Character Hub and RPG Maker VX for creating modern style sprites and maps, respectively, so I have basically everything I need in terms of visual assets to build this in RMVX. There'll probably be some other resources needed later (e.g. sound effects, music, icons, faux-document pictures, etc.), but I can create or scrounge for these things when they come up. For now all that's needed is to create a functional demo and iterate from there.