Animal Well is 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."
- Balatro creator started "properly playing the game myself about a week before launch" and had "a pretty emotional moment" where he realized it's "actually fun"
- Balatro creator initially considered a Steam release in part to help "get a game developer job somewhere," and after 5 million sales I'd say he found one
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."
The end process was "super-iterative," and eventually resulted in Basso designing "at least twice as many rooms that are in the game." Animal Well's roughly 16 by 16 grid means that there are around 256 different encounters in the game, which means that Basso estimates he "probably designed over 500 rooms while making this game that have either been cut or altered beyond recognition."
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 the best Metroidvania games.
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