Animal Well's solo dev casually reveals that the breakout metroidvania left 'at least twice as many rooms that are in the game' on the cutting room floor

GamesActionAnimal WellAnimal Well’s solo dev casually reveals that the breakout metroidvania left ‘at least twice as many rooms that are in the game’ on the cutting room floorWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Animal Well

At the time there was plenty of cynicism, but I’ll be damned—he really did simply publish a game that’s good, not bad.

The game’s success, though, is primarily down to Animal Well’s maestro of a solo dev Billy Basso who made the dang thing. As if making Animal Well wasn’t impressive enough, he alsorevealedin an interview with our friends over at Edge magazine (as part of theirmost recent issue) that he had a lot of rooms during the design phase that didn’t make it down the well.

“I think designing a Metroidvania is a lot harder than designing, say, a linear platformer where you can load the stages,” Basso tells Edge. “Just putting the new rooms into the map is the first step, and then it needs to go through probably five or six iterations of just playing through it and trying it … I will come up with a new item that has implications for the whole map, and I’ll have to do a whole pass through everything.”

Granted, it’s probably a mark of Basso’s skill as a developer that he knewwhatneeded to go—not every idea is a good one, and there are sometimes even good ideas that just don’t work as part of the whole—but that’s still an impressive amount of darlings to kill.

It’s something even more experienced, larger teams understand well—like Larian Studios, for example, who scrapped a whole mechanic where you’dfight your way out of the fugue planeafter every death just because it wasn’t quite clicking. If it ain’t working, don’t fix it: just get rid.

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