Metroidvanias have long been one of my favorite genres, as they give so much opportunity for non-verbal communication between the game designer and the player. Power-ups placed just out of reach on the screen tell the player that they will eventually become powerful enough to reach it, motivating them to continue exploring until they are able to. Puzzles with no immediate solution become great 'Aha!' moments when the player obtains a new ability that they can use to solve it. With these design principles in mind, I set a few goals for myself while developing Rise of the Round Wrecker for the Metroidvania Month 20 jam.

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It had become apparent after my previous few jams that I make pretty difficult games that can sometimes immediately turn people off. So for this game, I decided to have no enemies and no player death, so that I can eliminate this barrier to entry and focus on exploration and puzzle solving.

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After two previous platforming games, I realized that there was a huge gap between how the characters in my games controlled and how the characters in some of my favorite platformers (Like Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Ori) controlled. So I did a bunch of research on ways to improve player feel (adding things like jump buffering, jump cutting, coyote time, and variable gravity), did a ton of playtesting, and spent the first few days of development just fine-tuning the movement physics.

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I decided pretty early on that the key mechanics of the game would be making the player character grow, and giving them the ability to smash more and more things over the course of the game. This meant that smashing had to feel really satisfying and crunchy. So I couldn't simply make a block disappear when you smash into it, I had to add lots of player feedback (Sound, Particle Animations, and Slowdown) to make the player really feel the weight of smashing a block.

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