When planning out the level, we want to make sure that the player experiences a sense of progression. That is to say, the challenges they face should start out simple to ease them into the game and then become progressively more difficult. There should be some fluctuation, of course – without moments of low tension as well as high tension, the pacing won’t be satisfying. But overall, the player should start off dealing with relatively simple problems and steadily progress to tougher ones. In addition, the game should present new elements, abilities, and obstacles to the player one at a time so they have sufficient opportunity to learn each one in isolation before having to handle all of them at once. And even when they are handling multiple things at the same time, dealing with a pair of familiar concepts should come before having to manage a group of three…

So now that we’ve figured out the building blocks of the gameplay, it’s time to bring it all together and start planning from a top-down perspective. That includes not only a big picture view of the game experience, but also an eye towards the fluffier side of game design: what it’s about narratively, and what it’s going to look like. It will also answer the question, “Why are all the enemies skeletons?” Thrilling stuff. To decide these things, I looked through what I’d done so far and realized there was a bit of a conundrum caused due to the player having both a ranged attack and a melee attack: in most cases, the melee attack had to be more powerful. This ordinarily could be resolved with a little creativity, such as by saying “the main character can just throw rocks or something – that’ll handle it,” but I had a…

If you’re wondering why this wasn’t posted on Saturday, that’s because I decided retroactively that these “daily” posts would be more manageable if they were only on weekdays. I’ll see about upgrading to every day once I’ve got the regular update schedule thing down. Today’s topic is enemies. This is an area where it can be easy to go overboard with large amounts of content. To maximize the economy of development, we want to aim for only a small number of enemies that each provide a distinct, interesting challenge to the player, ideally ones that don’t require a large amount of unique graphics for each one. This small list of enemies can then be combined in different groups, layouts, etc. for specific enemy placements to mix up the moment-to-moment gameplay. To get the most bang for our bang, we need to identify the core function for each enemy type, of…

Continuing from yesterday’s minimalist Metroidvania, we’re going to dive into the meat and potatoes of the core gameplay: the combat! Since we want to keep the scope small, there needs to be just enough variation to keep things interesting, and no more than that. First we’ll start with the player’s weapons. Similar to Gather, one of my design goals here is to give the player both a ranged and a melee attack so that they have some short-term tactical options. To properly incentivize switching, though, I’d like to make a couple changes: Melee attack is a vertical slash instead of a horizontal strike. This makes it much easier to hit enemies, especially multiple enemies at once, which is sort of the point of melee combat. Melee attack should push (small) enemies back on hit. This gives the player just enough crowd control to manage mobile enemies that like to get…