Releasing 'Rise of the Round Wrecker' for MVM20

Officially releasing 'Rise of the Round Wrecker' for the Metroidvania Month 20 jam!

Metroidvanias have long been one of my favorite genres, as they give so much opportunity for non-verbal communication between the game designer and the player. Power-ups placed just out of reach on the screen tell the player that they will eventually become powerful enough to reach it, motivating them to continue exploring until they are able to. Puzzles with no immediate solution become great 'Aha!' moments when the player obtains a new ability that they can use to solve it. With these design principles in mind, I set a few goals for myself with this game.

Goal #1 - No Player Death - It had become apparent after my last few jams that I make pretty difficult games that can sometimes immediately turn people off. So for this game, I decided to have no enemies and no player death, so that I can eliminate this barrier to entry and focus on exploration and puzzle solving.

Goal #2 - Make Player Movement Feel Good - After two previous platforming games, I realized that there is a huge gap between how the characters in my games control and how the characters in some of my favorite platformers (Like Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Ori) control. So I did a bunch of research on ways to improve player feel (adding things like jump buffering, jump cutting, coyote time, and variable gravity), did a ton of playtesting, and spent the first few days of development just fine-tuning the movement physics.

Goal #3 - Make Smashing Blocks Feel Awesome! - I decided pretty early on that the key mechanics of the game would be making the player character grow, and giving them the ability to smash more and more things over the course of the game. This meant that smashing had to feel really satisfying and compelling. So I couldn't simply make a block disappear when you smash into it, I had to add lots of player feedback (Sound, Particle Animations, and Slowdown) to make the player really feel the weight of smashing a block.

There are still a ton of things I had wanted to add that I just didn't have the time for: intro/ending cutscenes, animations, more intricate background, more quality-of-life menus, mini-maps, visual ability tips, the list goes on and on. But I do believe I accomplished the goals I set out for myself, so regardless of how the game is received, I am feeling pretty proud of that fact!