Animal Well is one of the Metroidvania hits of the year, and perhaps one of the biggest indie breakouts of 2024 as well. But for solo developer Billy Basso, the process of crafting the acclaimed game is a tale of trial and error that many, many devs will be intimately familiar with.
In an interview with Edge Magazine, Basso was asked about how he crafted the game's intricate world, in which every room feels so carefully placed that swapping a single one could bring the whole thing crashing down. In response, he said that "I think designing a Metroidvania is a lot harder than designing, say, a linear platformer where you can load the stages, or even a Metroidvania where you have loading sections between different sub-maps."
