Beyond this, it is good to let the level be the hype-man for the boss, building it up. This is the base minimum of what you need. Everything the player needs to know to defeat the boss, they picked up elsewhere in the level or quest, but now they need to do that same stuff with skill and ease. A bit later still, you see if they remember it, even under stress.Ī good boss battle fits into this paradigm. Later on, after an interlude, you remind them of it. You introduce a new concept in a safe environment where the players can focus on it, and are forced to integrate it into their minds in order to advance.
#Hazelnut bastille demo discussion series
It is a tough line to walk, wanting the experience to be as rich as possible, but also manageable in scale to realize.ĮM: From a challenge and experience standpoint, what makes for the best, most satisfying boss battles? Conversely, what kinds of boss battles do you find repellent?ĭV: With level design in general, it is good to look at it as a series of lessons, quizzes, and tests players don’t realize they are taking. Well-meaning fans often request new features to be added in, and it is easy for us to get swept away in their positive energy, too. There is this constant drive to add all of these new features to pad out the fullness of the experience, but as a small team with limited time resources, it is a real enemy past a certain point. “Feature creep”, or the tendency to constantly be “+1’ing” new content into the development is something we really have to wary of. Our last style of item is made up of collectibles which can be combined for potion or buff items, or be traded barter-style with NPCs this last mechanic serves as a jump-off point for breaking the ice with several of the NPC storylines. These are generally acquired through exploring the side story, and meant as rewards for players who delve the deepest into the lives and troubles of the NPCs. You can equip a limited number of these, and they give various small boosts to the base character controller. Then we have another kind of item, our “rings”, which are probably natural for a Dark Souls player to quickly grasp. There are also “trophy” style items, which are relevant to the progression of the story, and sometimes give our heroine various small boosts or abilities. They each have their own distinctive puzzle and combat uses that further the gameplay along, and allow you to reach that one place you saw six hours back, and squirreled away in your mind for later, in classic metroidvania fashion. Some of them are the familiar “dungeon treasure” tools a player will recognize as being fairly similar to the ones from the Zelda series.
Having played and enjoyed the demo, I chatted with developer Dennis Varvaro on his process and the challenges being tackled by Aloft Studio.Įrik Meyer: On the surface, Hazelnut Bastille has the top-down perspective of classic SNES games like Secret of Mana or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but I see highly tuned, vast amounts of items, NPCs, and puzzles, so as you’ve developed the project, what do you see as the scope of what you’re creating, and as you’ve gone along, where have you had to rein content in?ĭennis Varvaro: With regards to items, they are pretty numerous, but they fit into a small number of distinct classes, all of which are meaningful to game progress. As a metroidvania game drawing from the feel of the iconic titles of yesteryear, Hazelnut Bastille brings an immediately-accessible level of polish to the table.