Powerups

Hello again! Part 1 is here, where I talked about action game boss design. This time I'll be talking about powerups in exploration-focused games, why I think the usual approach isn't perfect, and why I'm going in a slightly different direction for Sunfluffs.

First, when I say "exploration game", I mean any game where the primary way to make progress is by exploring to find new areas and items. People often call this "Metroidvania", but genre names based solely on comparisons to existing games have always felt weird to me, plus it leaves out a huge chunk of games that are exploration-focused but not like either of those games - the things I'll talk about even apply to games like Zelda, but not quite as strongly.

So, if you explore in a game, obviously it means you need to find new powerups! And those powerups should obviously help you explore further, so there's a really nice gameplay loop of remembering previous areas and thinking about where you can get to now. That part's basically set in stone.

What I find weird is that every game I can think of has every powerup be permanent, lasting for the entire rest of your playthrough. This obviously works and there's plenty of really good games with that formula! But I've always been thinking about some of the downsides, and why that was making it really difficult to design the kind of game that I wanted Sunfluffs to be.

If an item is permanent, then every later area needs to assume the player has it. If it's a damage upgrade that also opens a new type of door or solves a new kind of puzzle (like Metroid beams), that's easy to account for by just giving enemies more HP in areas past it, so that's fine, but a bit simple. If there's a bunch of items that also double as entirely new combat moves, it means the combat complexity needs to go way up as you get more, which might be overwhelming for some players. And the main thing I wanted to talk about, new mobility options, gets really messy when you have more than a few...

Here's an example of a really simple powerup. Use the item to charge up a jump that goes higher than a normal one! It's intuitive to understand, it's easy to use, and... it means every single ledge for the entire rest of the game needs to be 3 tiles higher, if I want it to be hard to reach. If I give a new movement powerup later that also adds a few tiles to your jump range in a different way (like a teleport, or a grapple), then any ledge needs to be 3 tiles higher to ensure players can't get to it until they have the new one, because you can always use the super jump boots and the new powerup. This gets really out-of-hand, really quickly.

Most games seem to counteract this in a few different ways... sometimes your starting movement sucks, in order to have enough room to stack 4 or 5 movement powerups on top of it without it going out of control. Often they'll save the big movement powerups all for the end, so there's nothing left to "break". A lot of the powerups in the middle of a game end up being a bit "lock and key", where the new item only works on specially-placed objects, or otherwise limiting where you can use them. In my game though, I want almost everything to be new movement options though, since they're awesome!

So what I'm doing in Sunfluffs is simple - you don't keep the items permanently. You explore a big map, collect 4 or 5 cool powerups, fight some bosses, and end on a huge climactic encounter that makes use of all of them! And then that level is entirely cleared out, and you start with no items in the next level... where you can find a new set of powerful movement items, with no overlap. This gives me a lot of room to make Cleru's basic movement be somewhat powerful without cutting into the "design space" of the powerups, and it means you can find extremely powerful items early in the game! I think it'll help make stages feel more distinct from each other as well, since you have a different moveset in each one.

Unfortunately since this is all really high-level stuff, I can't actually be certain that it'll all work out as good as it is in my head until I make way more areas and items. It's certainly freed me up to create cool movement powerups though, without needing to put them exclusively in the last few hours of the game! It means the areas aren't linked to each other as much as other exploration games, which is probably a downside, but that's a hit I'm willing to take. (It does mean less chance of people getting stuck, since there's a smaller "active area" to search, though.)

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This was probably a bit rambly! The short version is: the more often you reset a player's powerup state to zero, the cooler the powerups you can give them early on. (This applies to other genres too! Copy Kitty sets you to near-zero at the start of every stage for similar reasons.) I'm sure it's much trickier to find a balance for how often to reset powerups in exploration games compared to others, but I just find it strange how many of them default to "never". You should always question these things!

Does anyone know anything that follows a similar format to what I described, or do you have any suggestions for what I should write about later? Leave a comment! I'm curious what people think about these kinds of articles.

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