Posts made by Miles07

Here's a condensed version of the above charts, showing what the whole of the Alimbic Cluster looks like in terms of item dependencies:

Being inspired by Gamemaker's Toolkit's first season of its mini-series Boss Keys, which is a series that looks into the design philosophies of Zelda dungeons in terms of layout, I decided to do something similarly for the Metroid series. This idea was fueled by things like item randomizer algorithms and 100%-speedruns, because I wanted to find a way to chart out the areas of Metroid in an attempt to facilitate pathing and maybe even help Metroid fangame makers to think about design and gating in their games.

Hunters was a pretty neat challenge, despite the teleportation shenanigans and limited sets of keys and locks - I think it's still a neat design aspect to investigate.

@amwolfmusic For me it wasn't so much unease because Retro wasn't developing it, so much as nobody knew definitively who was developing it. Now knowing who is the development team, helps me form an idea as to the kind of quality to expect.

Multiplied by the fact that it's Retro again, and it's a bonus.

Here's a condensed version of the above charts, showing what the whole of Tallon IV looks like in terms of item dependencies:

Similarly to Magmoor, the Pirate Labs are set up like a series of rooms to traverse, but the obstacles to overcome in order to travel from room to room are more combat scenarios than actual locks-and-keys, until reaching the Thermal Visor.

While Magmoor itself is set up like a long hallway, there are very few obstacles set up from room to room that prevent traversal, until reaching the Spider Ball track in Twin Fires Tunnel. This explains the long horizontal lines in the vertical middle of this graph.

Important to note is that puzzles involving the Scan Visor are not included or depicted, as you're supposed to start with it. This includes "puzzles" like "scan these 4 symbols around the room" and "scan this console to unlock the door".

There isn't a real need to have this one, but I just wanted to add it for thoroughness. The locks on here correspond to ability tutorials: the Charge Beam for clearing a blocked passageway, the Morph Ball for squeezing through tunnels and into the Map Room, and Missiles for taking out Sentry Turrets. Then there's the one room with the Grapple Beam tutorial, and also the point where you lose your items.

Being inspired by Gamemaker's Toolkit's first season of its mini-series Boss Keys, which is a series that looks into the design philosophies of Zelda dungeons in terms of layout, I decided to do something similarly for the Metroid series. This idea was fueled by things like item randomizer algorithms and 100%-speedruns, because I wanted to find a way to chart out the areas of Metroid in an attempt to facilitate pathing and maybe even help Metroid fangame makers to think about design and gating in their games.

Metroid Prime was pretty easy to do, but I ran into the question of whether or not to include each room by name. It definitely helps with preliminary organization, but I eventually decided against keeping it like that for the final publication versions of the charts.

@young-kondo Which is why both Prime 4 and a future Metroid 5 need to be done right. If these aspects are not taken into account and the games turn out to be big... well, flops... then that's all she wrote for the series.

I just realized three problems with making a Metroid game for the Switch:
Length, breadth, and depth.

Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Smash Bros Ultimate are games that excel in all three categories, because of replay value / game length (length), the openness of design (breadth), and the complexity of said design (depth). Metroid games haven't really been known for any of these things.

Problem one, the length of Metroid games... They're usually short runs, and they reward speedrunning. The replay value has been in getting better times and finding exploits to shave off frames here and there. The longer a standard run of a Metroid game is, the lower the usual replay likelihood it has.

Problem two, the breadth... Most Metroid games fake an "open" design with multiple branching passageways and "sequence breaking" secrets, but all in all the Metroid games follow a linear progression, it seems. And no game in the series pulls off that bait-n-switch (haha, puns) better than Super Metroid.

Problem three, the depth... Most Metroid games don't allow players to really experiment with systems or advanced moves outside of two or so rooms (optional ones for the sake of getting the last few expansions in a game), and so interesting moments like trick shots in BotW or scaling the side of a building in Odyssey don't really happen in a Metroid game. Or, if they do, they happen very, very infrequently.

Nintendo Switch cartridges have a METRIC TON of space on them, so it would seem criminal to not utilize it to the fullest, right? Well, then, for a Metroid game to be a smash hit on the Switch, how on earth could these three problems be resolved? The games have to be longer (or more replayable), they need to be more open (and thus more flexible in progression and story/narrative), they need to be more systemic (like the immersive sims-like additions in BotW), they need to be more complex or customizable or configurable, they need to provide sufficient backdrops for variable, interesting gameplay...