I’m currently developing a 2D Metroidvania game, and I’d like to hear your thoughts: What are the key elements that make a Metroidvania fun to play and challenging in a satisfying way? I’m especially interested in how to balance exploration, progression, and difficulty without frustrating the player.

boynextdoornews

This is a good question. The core element here that drives everything in a metroidvania is the intersection between the abilities the player gets and the level design. Everything a player does in a platformer follows three sequential steps:

  1. The player sees a potential challenge or obstacle
  2. The player considers what kind of tools/abilities she has at her disposal to overcome the obstacle
  3. The player uses those tools to overcome the obstacle

As you've identified, a player needs exploration, progression, and difficulty. These effectively map to the three steps one to one - when the player encounters a new obstacle, that's the exploration. When she considers how to use the abilities and tools, that's the progression. When she has to actually perform the moves to overcome the obstacle, that's the difficulty. Once these three steps have been completed, you give the player a reward - open up a new part of the map, give a new item/ability, give more uses of an old item/ability, give more health, and so on. This is the core game loop for a metroidvania.

To do this, you need to design your levels to have a good spread of obstacles that allow for each of these three steps. Critical path rewards should be fairly easy to obtain - you want all players to be able to experience your game. Optional rewards should be harder to get - more difficult to see or overcome, but providing rewards there means you're communicating to the player that you saw and recognized their effort by rewarding it. Getting the hard-to-get secret whatever, even if it is only an achievement and/or cosmetic, feels really good.

Metroidvania games in particular need to place many obstacles and rewards in early areas of the game that are clearly visible from the critical path but not overcomable so as to encourage players to return to earlier areas and explore them after obtaining more skills/abilities/tools. An example would be the classic Legend of Zelda example of a heart container piece sitting out in the open in the overworld, but behind several rocks that are just too heavy to lift (at the moment). The player clearly sees the interesting reward (heart container piece!) and cannot obtain it (yet), so they make a mental note to come back later because they know something good is here. Pepper these visual hooks and rewards throughout your level design in order to draw a player to find new areas and new abilities.

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