Then it would be a game I never touch; when there's no other way to learn than by dying, your game has failed in my opinion. I shouldn't have to beat my head against some pattern that I can't discover through lore or elsewhere in the game. I'm in my 40s and used to game competitively in the early 2000s, FWIW.

Aside from the obvious things mentioned about flow, maps, immersion, etc., and to address some of the other things I've seen in the comments: configurability. Realize that not everyone will have the same physical abilities, skill, and/or time to play. Give options to people who want to tweak things to be more difficult and likewise for those who want it easier and more accessible.

leave out the unskippable cut scenes... lookin' at you, metroid fusion.

Please, playtest with unexperienced players

There's plenty of moments in hollow night where it can be way more than just 3 screens. Especially when you're exploring places for the first time and doing know where the next bench will be (I felt like there was no way near enough benches too). It's what made me eventually drop the game. I didn't find it hard, I just could not be arsed. Felt like a waste of time when I've got so many other games bI could be playing instead of playing the same 10-15 minutes of gameplay over and over again. I love metroidvanias too. One of my favourite genres.

Contact me in private if you need a programmer. I have my own game engine, but I'm willing to work with other engines.

You can't just, independently, as a single person, "have your own game engine". It has to be designed for a specific type of game, with a specific style. You don't have the time or resources to develop one that is an omnibus toolbox. Even then, people should be using Godot now, especially indie developers. Spend the time and resources enriching an existing open-source game engine.

Absolutely this. If we're going to take a Metroidvania as an example of this lesson, let's take Environmental Station Alpha. The game has a ton of potential as a good Metroidvania that is buried in a thick armor of speedrunner-level difficulty. I have never seen a Metroidvania be so stingy about health tanks, and this game desperately needs all of the health tanks you can get. It stinks of a developer team playtesting the hell out of their own game, and making difficulty decisions based on years of their own self-testing experience. When you release a game with a Normal difficulty, no Hard difficulty, and then are forced to create a Easy difficulty *after release*, you know you've fucked up. Here's how you do it: You can playtest your own game, but that one gets the "Hard" label. If you playtest for a Normal difficulty and you can't imagine how to create a Hard difficulty, the difficulty range is completely off. And Hard doesn't mean "only people in the double-digits can beat it". That's not even a scale, or just reserve that for some "Impossible" difficulty, if you want to get to 5-6 levels, like Doom does. Normal should be some reasonable setting based on how others playtest the game. Get some expectations from your playtest audience in terms of the kinds of games they've played and beat before. Are they complete noobs to any sort of fast-paced gameplay, or have they beaten other Metroidvanias or games like Cuphead? Based on that, figure out whether the advice they give you applies to an Easy or Normal difficulty curve.

Are we remaking Attack on Titan?

>There's plenty of moments in hollow night where it can be way more than just 3 screens Name them. I'd be happy to counter.

Game engine optimized for retro pixelart aesthetics written in D go BRRR

It's written in Brainfuck, but it's really really good. Trust me, bro!

BOTW took the item breakage too far. You couldn’t even kill a Lynel *with its own weapon*, because it would break before the Lynel died. The durability could have been quadrupled, and the game would have been better. It would still be enough to encourage rotating your items, but not so much that you’re constantly swapping mid-fight.

But also, be sure to eventually post about them *somewhere*. Don’t do the whole “devs left this secret in the game that was so obscure and difficult to find that it wasn’t discovered for 20 years” BS.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer specialized engines over the current trend of engines being made to do almost anything out of the box. Also D is not like Brainfuck, but C if it was designed well (and had optional memory safety).

But also, don’t fucking do what Metroid Dread did, and try to defeat sequence breaks. The Dread devs went out of their way to ruin speed runners’ experiences, by basically fighting against sequence breaks at every opportunity. Sequence breaks aren’t something the average player should be able to do accidentally, but don’t try to actively stop it either. Maybe someone discovers that a particular platform normally requires a double jump to reach, but can be reached by kiting an enemy across the room and using some well-timed damage knockback to get a boost in height. This obviously isn’t intended gameplay, but it may be something that speed runners learn to do reliably, because getting the double jump ability adds 10 minutes to their route. *Don’t fucking patch that out as soon as you learn about it*, because you’ll just stifle any interest that speed runners have in your game. And in a decade, there’s a very good chance that the *only* people keeping your game relevant will be speed runners.

I mean it happened to me a few times when exploring. I don't know the names of the places. It was still kinda early on. I think the messy place I tried to enter was the mushroom place? And i kept dying in there then had to travel what felt like half of a full zone to get back there because i had yet to find a bench in there.

Too many metroidvanias have abilities that work more like keys - they open a door that gives access to a new area of the game. A better ability is something that changes how the game fundementally plays, or makes old areas feel fresh. Starting the game with sufficient movement is a big one. Hollow Knight starts with too few movement abilities, and the beginning is slow.

Take it a step further: include an option to disable all cutscenes and a speedrunning mode with in game timer.

what a lovely idea!