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@Norithics asked:

Okay so I'm curious! You seem to have a lot to say about the impact of world design, so I'm dying to know if you have Thoughts™ with regards to Classicvania versus Metroidvania. Is one better than the other? Are there different considerations for both??

Obviously you can't quite put one over the other, though... I feel like classicvanias were far more powerful examples of their craft than most of the igavanias (obviously Rondo and SOTN place a lot higher, but the rest...)

Like most Igavanias felt more like a little fast food treat for people who loved metroidvanias.. but if I was writing about Metroidvanias the mobile games would not be the first place I'd go. Meanwhile, the Classicvanias are still kinda best-in-class for what they try and do. That doesn't make them better, because games aren't contests of who game designs the most correct or w/e but their influence can't be understanded. While I joked about Dark Souls being a Metroidvania, it's more directly influenced by classicvania design ideas.

The difference in considerations pretty simple but snowball really fast!

So it starts with DIRECTIONALITY!! You know what way someone is gonna show up in Classicvanias. Image this screen from castlevania 1...

... The skeletons are given platforms to retreat back for. Birds guard jumps at their ideal spaces. The specter is there to back attack you. Do this the other way and it loses a lot of charm. The dynamic, platform hopping skeletons become really flat. The birds... sort of work, and the specter is no longer a surprise to divide your attention.

Things are tight because you know the players direction. you roughly know their strength is, and, even more so, you know what their goal is. They want to go forward. They're not going to walk back and forth through this area over and over again looking for things and navigating around.

So then you look at the pits, the second biggest different. Pits are a huge danger and a way to ramp up the risk of an encounter. The risk/reward for everything is now WAY scarier and the effectiveness of enemies changes depending on their relative use to each other and to pits.

The design of Classicvanaia's is using the environment to maximize the effectiveness and variety of experiences you can have with basic enemy types

You are maximizing limited resources by making things that play off each other. What if skeleton...? What if skeleton and pit...? What if skeleton and pit... and bird? What about if skeleton... and medusa heads?

This is how Souls games are designed, especially the older ones.

These encounters are kinda doing the same thing.

In a lot of Metroidvanias, the point isn't the elevate the enemies, it's the elevate the environment. Enemies slow you down, they add friction, and force you to engage. In Igavanias they add a visual flair. Enemies tend to be location specific to fit into a theme. You're doing a little bit of the enemy combo stuff but generally you're usually aiming for a slightly engaging encounter the first time through, then easy, and then a formality. Often they're part of the visual design, helping to differentiate similar rooms. Enemies are texture for the world.

You could add pits to Metroidvanias. You could add deeper combat. You could do cool enemy layout changes depending on how you come into a room. A lot of this stuff ends up missing through because they're coming in trying to fix metroidvanias by amping up the part they think is weak. But you don't improve a game by ticking all the game design boxes, you improve a game by serving your goals.

"Does my game actually NEED enemies at all? do I care about combat? Or if I do, what is the role of a connected world here? How does one want pull against another? Is there anything interesting I can magnify by looking at the interesting tension between these elements?"

Most of the things that succeed aren't trying to be metroidvanias, they are things that just happen to be because they're serving their goals first.

You can do this the opposite too though. Brave Earth: Prologue is, genre wise, a classicvania. But I care a lot about connected worlds and the verisimilitude of spaces. This isn't that far out there, CV1's classic map screen shows how everything fits together and where everything is. But I have my own goals too. I like when things slowly change and have consistently. The ground areas outside shouldn't change THAT much between areas, so instead of radically different tiles, it can be a matter of time. It can be the matter of weather.

Here is a space earlier in the day. Here is the same type of space at dusk. Now there is a storm. Now you're inside and I can validate a larger shift. How is the storm outside interacting with where you are? How do i make where you are feel like a sensible space?

I can't do that last one 100% of the time without hurting BEP as a game but this is already a 2d abstraction. It's not about being perfect. Like yes I'm going to make the cathedral being cathedral shaped but also yes idk why people put those moving platforms over there ahaha how weird~

I like connectivity but have no backtracking. But I have multiple characters with different routes. These routes don't diverge as a player choice. It's overlapping content. But the characters enter and exit stages in different places. You seem how spaces connect AND I get to make reused content feel less repetitive. I can even do the "do the area backward trick" Because I don't do it all the time. It doesn't compromise or add design challenges to the whole game, just a few fun, interesting spots.

The nicest compliment I ever got was "I never had a completely linear game feel as much like a metroidvania"

But I had to choose what was important to me. if I was like "I want treasure!! and branching paths!! And like maybe you an backtrack and--" now I'm collecting design debt that I have to pay off somewhere else. Instead, I tried to figure out what was economical for the game I wanted to make.

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