GamesPlatformerAnimal WellSolo dev behind breakout Metroidvania hit Animal Well says his game has 256 encounters, but he had to cut at least 500 of them during developmentWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesPlatformerAnimal WellSolo dev behind breakout Metroidvania hit Animal Well says his game has 256 encounters, but he had to cut at least 500 of them during developmentWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bigmode)
Animal Wellis one of the Metroidvania hits of the year, and perhaps one of the biggest indie breakouts of 2024 as well. But for solo developer Billy Basso, the process of crafting the acclaimed game is a tale of trial and error that many, many devs will be intimately familiar with.
In an interview with Edge Magazine, Basso was asked about how he crafted the game’s intricate world, in which every room feels so carefully placed that swapping a single one could bring the whole thing crashing down. In response, he said that “I think designing a Metroidvania is a lot harder than designing, say, a linear platformer where you can load the stages, or even a Metroidvania where you have loading sections between different sub-maps.”
Every room in Animal Well is, eventually, accessible to every other room, but that comes with certain challenges. Basso says that his development process often involved designing “some puzzles that can be played in isolation for a section of the map” that’s designed around use of a specific in-game item. That might turn up “half a dozen things I want to teach the player” in a given section. Basso would design that section, and then “the rest of the map starts to grow roots on it.”
The act of putting the new rooms into the rest of the map, however, is “just the first step.” After that, each section “needs to go through probably five or six iterations of just playing through and trying it.” Potentially a long time after that, however, Basso might have come up with a new item that had its own impact on those rooms “and I’ll have to do a whole pass through everything.”
Despite that size, and all of the work that didn’t make the final cut, Animal Well is a tiny game, at least when it comes to storage.At just 34MB, it’s probably smaller than its own 4K PS5 background, which also means that it’s a real blessing for my hard drive.
Take a look at our list of thebest Metroidvania games.
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