ARTICLES/Metroidvania World Design

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Alexman's Method for Metroidvania Map Making

This article was written for Exister on Metroid Construction initially upon inquiry as to my world design process. Shout-outs to them!

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PREFACE

Welcome to the Alexman's Method for Metroidvania Map Making (AMMMMM™) document!

The purpose of this document is to share the method of map creation that I've slowly developed since 2016-ish!

Things to remember!

- This is only one way to make Metroid games. There's no one correct answer, nor do I claim nor believe this to be the approach Nintendo uses!

- These are guidelines, not rules. If you find a detail outlined in this document to be too restrictive, too specific, or otherwise incongruent with your game design beliefs, then disregard it with no shame!

- Return to Zebes has been in development for most of the time I've been interested in Metroid. Not all of the principals outlined here are reflected in every aspect of its core map design, as it functioned as a tool to help me learn more than anything else!

- I am framing this as an instructional piece for the purpose of demonstration!

INTRODUCTION

Before we even start building a map, it helps to get a few things figured out! For example:

- How linear will your game be?

- What's the story? Any particular narrative themes?

- What kind of location does the game take place in? What sort of sublocations will there be?

- How big will your game be? What are the goals, and method of progression?

It's okay if you don't have all or any of these figured out. It's best to go in with as much information as possible but there's one thing worse than coming in with no information: Coming in with incorrect or made up information! If you want to just make a hack completely from scratch with no planning, for example, that's okay! You can come up with everything you need to as you go! If not, then great, it'll help you a lot to be prepared! If there's one big takeaway from this document that I want everyone to have, it's this: Rules, formula, planning... These are all useful tools for the creative process, but they are only that; tools. A good tool serves the user. You should never find yourself serving your tools. Are the rules stifling you? Break them! Is the formula too boring? Stray away! Things not going as planned, but also not going poorly? Make new plans! You are an artist. Make art! C:

For the purposes of example in this document, I will design a Metroid world under the following criteria.

The medium: Metroid: Zero Mission ROM hack

The story: Samus finds herself imprisoned in a Space Pirate facility and must escape.

Linearity: Not too much!

Location: A planet that is partially inhabited by space pirates. Some environments we can have would be perhaps a prison complex, a set of military barracks, internal mechanisms to sneak around in, and a rocky cave system at the surface.

THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME!

We find ourselves presented with one of the hardest parts of making any art project. The blank canvas! Where else to begin but the first area? Unless you only have the final area planned, in which case maybe start there! But I have little planned, so we'll start with the beginning!

So, what, then? How do we start? Well, let's look back at some of the planning elements I listed!

According to our story, Samus will be escaping captivity. So, here's something we can do with that. Similar to Metroid Dread, I think we should start Samus at/near the bottom of the world map, and progress upwards. The natural flow of movement is the path of least resistance. In a world with gravity, such as our Metroid game, that path is downwards! To have Samus progress upwards is indicative of an active struggle to penetrate through a challenge; think of it like climbing out of a hole! Whereas Super Metroid is more akin to digging one. To climb out of the hole is to pull yourself over top of a seemingly insurmountable obstacle that you have no way out of otherwise. To dig a hole is to willingly throw yourself down into the danger.

If we start our Metroid game at the bottom of the map, one consequence of this is that we can't really have a compelling escape sequence at the end in the traditional sense, since A: The escape sequence should be a climb rather than a dig/descent, and B: What's at the bottom of the map to escape to? It's probably underground!

Note how I said "in the traditional sense". There are ways around all of these problems! For now, we won't worry about it. I just want to keep it in the back of our mind while we build the map so we leave room to think of something later.

So! Samus will be starting at the bottom of the map. Naturally, since she's imprisoned, the first area that she spawns in will be that prison complex are we mentioned. I'll call it Prison for simplicity!

Here's something really important to figure out before you start making any area. Shape identity! Shape identity encompasses many elements of the world, such as how/where rooms are placed, how big they are, what shape they are, etc. If you've studied character design at all, you've likely heard the notion that a good character should be identifiable by its silhouette alone.

I am of the belief that this silhouette principle also applies to maps. It will do a lot to set your location apart if it looks unique at a glance!

So, how about Prison, then? How can we make it look unique and identifiable? Let's look at some of its properties and pull some solutions out of our asses!

Organic, alive, asymmetric, natural... All of these sound like good buzzwords for our map, don't they? But wait! It's a prison complex! A manmade structure! As a completely artificial area, it should be none of these things.

To emphasize the artificial nature of Prison, it will be constructed primarily out of straight hallways, shafts, and boxy rooms. No weird room shapes, no winding tunnels. The player should be able to look at the full map and see that a human (or a Space Pirate!) designed it.

Since it's specifically a prison complex, it should also be well-structured. Not all artificial areas need to have visibly repetitive or structured or modular looking design, but this is a good case for it, since the main purpose of the area in-universe is to store a bunch of individuals in segmented locations with easy to access passages between.

Prisoners aren't supposed to leave their cells, so said cells should be contextualized largely as dead ends on the main map. Save for special cases! It should never look like a space pirate has to travel through a cell to get from one place to another.

As well, it's important to look at who exactly built Prison, and who for. If Prison were operated by humans, I'd say it'd be a good idea to have it constructed mostly out of hallways with fewer shafts. But wait! Space Pirates can climb walls pretty easily, so it would make sense to have their prison facility be just as vertical as it is horizontal! This will give us a bit of extra freedom! But, let's say the facility WAS made by humans... One way we could get away with making it still pretty vertical is to have elevators or the like for easy transport!

Since we're contextualizing this as Samus escaping, I think it'd be neat if we treat the opening of the game like the Zero Suit section in Zero Mission. Except, this is in the context of the main game, so it won't be quite so linear! Perhaps we should have vents or the like for Samus to sneak through!

So, here are our main room types we'll be using. We can come up with more as we need them.

Prison cell: This should be a square/rectangular boxy room. We'll make sure they're bigger than 1*1 map tiles so that it stands out more from the hallways on the map, but not too big so that they still feel cramped.

Patrol hallway: Straight-forward horizontal rooms, one map tile thick for space pirates to dwell in.

Patrol shaft: Same as hallway, just vertical.

Vents: We can be a bit more free-form with these! Most players won't understand the complexities of air ventilation, so we can make them a bit more random and organic without it breaking immersion. We will make these areas free of space pirates, but they'll require morph ball to enter. This way, we get a sense of power progression, since Samus will be forced to sneak around the pirates head-on until she gets morph ball.

Now, if you're going to make a game with no map for the player to read, like NEStroid or Metroid II, they you should make sure rooms aren't crammed super tightly together. They need room to breathe to make it easier for the player to draw a map.

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NOTE - After discussion of this article with Exister, we've come to the conclusion that some people make maps very differently from each other. I primarily draw maps out of lines and/or nodes, where the distance relationship between two rooms doesn't really matter. That's what I gave my advice based on.

Exister, and I'd reckon most other people, draw maps attempting to actually 1:1 copy the screens onto a grid. In this case, having rooms more tightly packed together makes it easier to deduce relative size!

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Ugh, that's a lot of fuckin' pre-amble, huh? Well, if you'll believe it, we're ready to place our first tiles! In fact, we're into the meat of my world design method, here.

Right here starts the core sequence of steps that I build Metroid worlds out of. These next steps will be essentially what we repeat ad nauseum for the remainder of our time building the world.

Step 1! Find a place on the map to start Samus. Try to leave yourself room. We'll start her in a corner, because I don't really intend for Samus to be returning to this part of the map.

Step 2! Make a path to another point on the map. Since Samus is starting inside of a prison cell, she'll need a way to escape. For the sake of convenience, we'll just say there's a secret shootable block in Samus' ceiling that lets her enter an above cell. This cell will be unlocked because it's empty. This will also be the indication for the player to search for vents later, by making them aware of their existence now.

The end of this point on the map is where you will place Samus' next goal. Usually it'll be a key upgrade! I'm contextualizing this as a missile in a storage room. When making a path, keep in mind a few things! The path does not need to be entirely within the same area. It does not need to be made entirely out of new rooms; it only has to end in one. And, of course, it doesn't need to be super obvious! Just make sure its reasonable to stumble upon it. Moreso early game, you'll want to make level design that really encourages going this way. The fun way to encourage going through an area is to leave little breadcrumbs. Make it so the first new door you encounter always leads the right way, or make it so that red doors funnel generally toward it, or have a new tileset to mark that you're entering somewhere new, etc. The possibilities are endless! You know what's really lame, though? Blocking off every other possible path! It's an exploration game, let the player explore! Now, this isn't a level design tutorial, but always remember that level design is just as important as map design! They are intertwined so thoroughly that one can't work without the other! The map design is the cradle in which the level design sits.

Now, step 3! Place branching paths (pt 1)! These branching paths should be accessible without the upgrade in question. They don't necessarily have to lead to a minor item. They can also lead to something useful, like a save or a map room. They can also lead to something that'll be helpful to remember later, like a green door, or a suspicious dead end.

You may notice a few things. Firstly, I added another prison cell. This is accessible early by finding the secret air vent for keen-eyed players who recognize patterns. They will find an early missile tank in here, letting them skip the first path entirely. You should always reward players for recognizing patterns where you can. This is the most fair way to place untelegraphed secrets.

Next, I adjusted the location and size of a few rooms. I placed an energy tank in the bottom right hallway, so I moved the cells back so that the hallway could be exactly five tiles long and allow the energy tank to sit directly in the center. I then made other hallways five tiles long to match it. Another thing you could do is place the energy tank right outside of the cell to alert the player that it's there, but we have our cell as a separate room in this example, so the camera won't be able to pan over to it. I also messed with the shafts so that every hallway can be spaced exactly two tiles apart. This adds to the rigorously artificial look of the area.

Next is the final step.

Step 4! Add branching paths from the main path that "require" (sequence breaking is fun) the "goal" to reach.

Now, a few things to point out!

First, I used missiles as the example goal here because it's easy to see on the map that you need missiles to enter a certain path. It won't always be obvious on the map, though, so be careful! Either remember it well when you're designing, or mark it with your mapping software somehow. As for our demonstration, you're just gonna have to take me word for it, so to speak, when I reach step 4.

Second, there's an empty path that leads to nothing! What's that about? Well, it's important! Just keep it in mind for now!

Third, it's a straight-forward path, but with a lot of dead ends branching off. Now this reveals another card in my hand; the reason I picked a deliberately artificially structured first area! These, my friends, are hubs. A hub is a room, or collection of rooms, that serves as sort of a main highway through an area in which everything branches off from. You don't strictly need obvious hubs, but they can be handy for helping the player explore efficiently! You can use as many or as few as you need, but generally a new hub will denote the start of a new "chunk" of the game. A hub can be as simple as a giant shaft with a bunch of hallways branching off (this is the most common approach, actually!) or as complex as Metroid II's SR388 surface (it's just a giant hub!)

Fourth, you'll see I actually made a big no-no, here! You may recall before that I mentioned that the patrol hallways/shafts are where the space pirates will be. This means that they will be more difficult to get through! You'll also see in the bottom right that I added a leftwards hallway with a red door at the end. A red door that you can make it to before missiles, but not open. This is a problem because the last thing a player wants after slogging their way through a challenge is to be told "Fuck you! Dead end! Come back later!" You basically just wasted their time! This isn't the most egregious example you'll see, it's just a single hallway after all, but it would be good courtesy for us to move the red door to the other side of the hallway instead. Challenge that isn't rewarded is bad game design!

So, why, then, is it okay for me to do this with the green door hallway? Well, it isn't necessarily! By our outlined room rules, those space pirates are gonna make havoc for you just for you to be faced with a blockage you might not even be able to break through for another hour! But, a random green door in a shaft will be a lot more unlikely for a player to remember an hour later than they would an entire hallway that leads only to a mysterious door...

Gah, stupid fucking rules! I hate them! If only we weren't forced to put space pirates here!

...Lucky for us, rules are tools! Tools serve us, not the other way around! We don't have to put space pirates in this hallway if we don't want to. See? That wasn't so hard! It's up to us to be the judge of when and how we do or don't follow our rules.

Now, back to that branch that seemingly leads nowhere... You probably guessed by now, but if not, allow me to elaborate! This is where the game continues! Repeat step 1, starting here! Then step 2, 3, 4... Rinse, repeat, recycle! This is the core of my Metroid map design approach. I call it the Hydra Recurse. Make a path, make branches off from it, then make a new path that IS a branch off from the first path, make branches off from it, then make a path that IS a branch off from the first OR second path... Yadda yadda, rinse and repeat until you run out of content!

Of course, it's important to remember that you can start step 1/2 from ANYWHERE in the world! There's no rules! But be sure it makes sense where you decide to do it!

You can start step 3/4 from ANYWHERE in the world, too! New side content to explore can open up as far back in the world as you like! But it would be most kind if you put at least some of them in close proximity to the "key" you just obtained.

Basically, the gist of it is that you're algorithmically filling out the world one cycle at a time, with each cycle getting progressively more complex.

One last thing, you'll notice I put a map station! Map stations are a complex subject that I'll come back to later, but for now it doesn't matter to much.

So, let's do morph ball next! From this point forward, new additions will be highlighted yellow for convenience.

Step 1 + 2!

You may notice that I changed it so that our new branch comes out of a secret passage rather than a marked door! Why? Well, I wanted to paint one thing plain and obvious.

Whether or not you want to lock progression behind hidden blocks is up to you! But, if you ARE going to do it, the player has to know that you will! But it's lazy and cheap to just say "PROGRESSION IS LOCKED BEHIND SECRET BLOCKS SOMETIMES" in your hack description, and it might scare off players who are afraid of NEStroidisms! So, no, we're not going to do that. Instead, we'll organically teach the player that these situations will pop up.

We HAVE to do it now, while we're still early on in the hack, and the world isn't too big to explore. There's not many places that the way forward COULD be, so there's not many places to faff around like a dumbass in. The player will probably figure out pretty quickly that the way forward is in the suspicious dead-end. This will teach the player very early in the game that you're going to design the game this way, so that they know what to expect later. You'll find that most game design decisions aren't REALLY objectively good or bad, but rather the badness comes when you condition a player to expect one thing and then they beat their head against the wall later when you randomly take that thing away without telling them. That's mean. No, we're going to make sure they know exactly what they're in for here and now so that we're not fucking them over in the long run. You don't have to make an easy or forgiving game, but always respect the time and consideration of your players!

In addition, to make sure the player finds where to go, the map station will guide the way. But, be careful giving the player a map station early. Showing them the entire area all at once can be overwhelming, especially when you have an area as large as, say, Super Metroid's Norfair!

Now, something that might be fun here would be to turn this room into a prison cell, and feature, say, arachnus in here as a prisoner, who you fight to obtain morph ball! Food for thought C:

Step 3!

Some things to do along the way! Firstly, there's an alternate path you can take that still funnels you toward morph ball, but the detour gives you two items. At the cost of time, of course. There is another, more elusive benefit, however! The player gets to save on missiles instead of using them on the red door! If the player explores off from the beaten path, they will be rewarded! Now, it being the first blue door may make it appear easy, but we can fix that with level design! Have some space pirates clustered directly in front of it to push the player upward so that they have to fight there way inside here. Always funnel the player where you want them to go by manipulating what's easiest to do.

I also added a very big room that doesn't fit the mold of our previously established room archetypes. Because, remember: Rules are tools! Tools should serve us, not us serve them!

The big room does a few fun things.

1: We can put a puzzle in here! Our level designer is probably hating us a bit right now because we're spamming so many monotonous hallways and shafts at them. Give them something fun to do!

2: It gives a point of visual interest on the map that is sorely needed. Makes it look less repetitive.

3: The player needs fun side content to engage with. If they're just marching forward nonstop from place to place at a breakneck speed, that quickly gets boring and overwhelming.

4: Since it's such a visually interesting room in contrast to the rest of the map, the eye will naturally be drawn here! This will be important for...

Step four!

First, you'll see in the bottom right I added some optional items. Both of which are found with the same pattern recognition as before!

I also added a shortcut between areas. PLEASE MAKE SHORTCUTS! You don't want to have to implement DISGUSTING fast travel... So make shortcuts! Make make make make make shortcuts shortcuts shortcuts! Most of the legwork involved in making backtracking fun is down to the level designer, but the map designer has to put in some effort, too!

But more importantly, in the puzzle area, there's a suspicious dead end added that leads into a mini morph ball maze which will lead to the next area! If we wanted to, we could slot power grip into progression before being able to enter the giant morph maze, but we'll assume it's default equipment to streamline the map design this time around.

Now, next we'll focus on the barracks, which we'll call Barracks.

Prison is a bit of a boring map, no? Structured, artificial, full of predictable passages and the like. Military barracks could easily be the same way! After all, what's more organized than military complexes? Thus, it makes sense that we should follow the train of utmost logic and design the area in the exact same way!

...WRONG! That's boring and stupid! Let's mix it up.

Okay, so, the Barracks they'd originally built fell into ruins during a particular incident involving seismic activity and a flood of acid. They saved what they could, and hastily build new structures amidst the ruins. Barracks, as they stand now, are a hodgepodge of technological ruins and hastily constructed operation stations set up amidst an unstable cave system filled with acid. Yeah, I pulled it out of my ass, so what? It's fun!

What sort of rooms should we do, then? Well, it's not necessarily scientific, but my description of acid pools and seismic activity almost reminds me of volcanoes! What if we take inspiration from there?

To make something reminiscent of lava tubes and volcano anatomy, what if we build a lot of the area as big, open bubble-shaped rooms, connected loosely by thin, branching tunnels?

Seems like it could be fun! And then we can have more boxy, structured rooms to serve as the actual barrack areas! And we can set up like, crude scaffolding and chain link fences inside of the acid pockets to serve as the temporary infrastructure the pirates set up.

For the sake of logic, let's say that the next item we'll get is varia suit! Okay, step 1/2, activate!

You'll notice I made a pretty long path this time! Well, the player is starting to get into the groove of the game, so it's about time to give them some serious ground to cover! Prison had a lot of backtracking, so we're giving the player a nice long bit of content to go forth and explore! The introduction to the world is over, and they're starting to obtain an arsenal, so it's time to open things up a bit wider! which is a trend we'll continue in step 3!

Samus starts at the bottom of the map because she leaves the previous area through the top.

You'll also see that I started using rounded map tiles. This is just a visual difference, but it does a lot to make the map feel distinct and more organic. Consider using unique shapes for tiles!

So,a couple things! First, I figured, hey! Most hubs ARE just shafts with a bunch of spokes coming off, right? Well, let's buck the trend and do something different! I took the idea of the winding tube and decided to make a more unique big, ring-shaped hub tunnel! I also made part of it a heated room, which is stepping on step 4's toes a bit, but we'll live!

We can justify the heated rooms in-universe as being full of toxic fumes from the acid or something, since it isn't a lava area. Or we could just have some of those parts of the map be flooded with acid completely!

Step 4! And a bit of step 1/2 for the next path...

So, quite a bit to cover, here! First, I made the hub tunnel a bit thinner to help it visually separate a bit more from the bubble chambers. So, lots of morph tunnels, now. But I tried to include still more non-morph paths, because we want the level designer to have as easy a time as possible keeping things interesting and fresh throughout!

Second, I started on the next path. I wasn't gonna add a ton of new rooms leading to the next keys, just a couple, so I figured I'd lump them in here. Partially because I'm actually adding TWO keys on this path. The next major items to collect are wave beam and speed booster. You can collect them in any order, but they're in roughly the same location. Speed booster is the room in the top left, and wave beam is the other major item a little below it. I imagine that the door connecting the heated bubble room to the square unheated rooms would have a wave gate, with the button facing to the right.

It might be worth moving wave beam to that section in the bottom left of the map instead. It would create more potential interesting routes to reach it. I will move it in the next step, but I won't bother highlighting that since it won't be the focus.

Either wave beam or speed booster will be required to reach the next path (entrance highlighted in the bottom right); not both. Getting both will be helpful, though!

So, pretty big area, now, right? And, Samus is pretty well geared up! Not to mention, the player has been at it for a while! It's about time we spice things up in a big way.

Remember how I said that those same four steps would just be repeated forever? Well, I lied a little bit. It's time to talk about...

BOSS HIDEOUTS

Samus discovers an oddly shaped room in the corner of the map... Now, we, the map designer can't see it right now, because we haven't placed a map marker for it, but Samus and the level designer sees it all too clearly... Two large statues, depicting the ugly visages of Kraid and Ridley!

We know what THAT means! Samus is gonna have to pop a bullet in these bozos' heads before she can move on!

Now, as far as I'm concerned, there's three ways to make an interesting boss hideout. The first thing you can do is the NEStroid approach. It's just a big maze and gauntlet that tests your navigation skills.

The second approach is to do it more like a zelda dungeon. A self-contained Metroidvania of sorts, with its own tightly compact set of locks and keys, like Zero Mission.

We'll do both o hose!

The third approach is to just integrate it naturally into the map, like Fusion. We won't be doing this! Not because it's a bad choice; I actually like it a lot! But I basically already taught you how! Just make another path, same four steps, except the goal at the end is a boss rather than or in addition to an item.

And, there's two ways you can plop it into the world! You can have it be an extension of an existing area, like Super, or be its own contained area, like Zero Mission.

We'll do both!

To start, lets do Kraid's hideout. We'll give him a dungeon-type sub-area hideout. Later, when we do Ridley, we'll give him a maze-type own-area hideout!

Now, one big thing I want to stress: YOU DO NOT NEED BOSSES TO MAKE A GOOD METROID GAME! There are three main types of keys in Metroid games. First are items, which give you capabilities to reach areas you couldn't before. Second are knowledge keys, which are places you could technically go earlier, but you just didn't know how to reach them yet. The third type are event keys. Actual blockages are present in the world that don't go away until you perform a certain task.

Not all things fall neatly into one category. For example, ziplines in Zero Mission are sort of a combination between item and event keys. But bosses are strictly event keys. At the end of the day, it's just something you find to deactivate a glorified door somewhere else. You can achieve this in many ways. EG: In Metroid II, you have to track down and destroy a bunch of metroids. Still bosses serving as event keys, but handled differently. Than is traditional. Or, you could do it like (to shill a bit) Tourian in Return to Zebes! There are two shield generators you track down and destroy to deactivate a set of shields. It's basically the same purpose as a boss in different coating. You can even forgo this kind of stuff entirely and have progression be exclusively based on items or knowledge! Or make even more interesting event keys, such as a pump that drains an area of water ala Metroid Fusion.

But, for the sake of the basics, we'll stick to boss hideouts.

Now, since Kraid is big, bubbly, green, stinky, and loves acid, we'll put him in the big bubbly green stinky acid area. But, here's the trick! Since we're making a unique sub-area of sorts, lets mix up the shape identity a bit! We'll contextualize this as a big chunk of the barracks that survived, constituting tightly packed square rooms and corridors.

Since this is a dungeon-type hideout, we'll need a set of keys, too! We still have plenty of items to work with, and I'm happy to do one of those, but lets do something a little more interesting too. In Zero Mission, the acid worm Mua lurks in Kraid's Lair. Let's bring it back! Except, this time, when you defeat it, it will lower the acid level in the entire hideout! Perhaps Mua is what was responsible for the seismic activity we mentioned a while back?

Let's begin!

For our purposes, any screen colored orange here is submerged in acid, and will be cleared when Mua is dead. The "dot" room in the top left of the hideout is ziplines, which will be used to obtain the major item (bombs), which will be used to reach Mua (the "empty" 2*2 room in bottom right)

Also added a left side missile right side super missile door to serve as a shortcut back to where Varia was, making those rooms thematically part of the hideout now! Cool tie-in, I think! I also fixed a door that was meant to be this way near the top left of the entire area. This is a cool way in my opinion to make a shortcut that you permanently open from one side! If you sequence break for supers somehow, it also becomes cool routing options

First rooms are shown on the map to help the player know where to go, and the rest is hidden to add challenge!

Straight-shot to Kraid; I imagine it's an enemy gauntlet! Also added an optional charge beam pickup if you backtrack to use bombs in a certain tunnel.

Reward for beating Kraid is Supers!

Since Kraid's Hideout entrance is placed where it is, the path back to Prison (where you need to go) is very short! Organic breadcrumbs!

Back to area 1 we go! In a full-scale game, you'd probably want to have some more items in between Kraid and Ridley, but for example purposes we're skipping to Ridley.

I also added a few areas to grab expansions with your newfound powerups! Ideally, we'd have even more than this, but I'm running out of steam here, so I'm trying to wrap things up quickly! You should add some more in the other area, too, specifically accessed with supers. Supers are serving as sort of our "mid game" item, where they open up a lot of previously unopened areas, and we let the player wander aimlessly and find new stuff until they stumble across the right path. Think of it like power bombs in SM!

That tunnel at the bottom leads to Supers. I imagine you can, in fact, reach it early in the game for some sequence breaking fun... Kehehe...

So, Ridley will be the easiest area to design yet!

Really, since it's just gonna be a maze/gauntlet, you can go ham! Make it put all of the upgrades you've gotten to good use! Of course, you don't have to make it impossible without the skippable ones, but they should help! Since there's not really much structure to it, I just threw together a map willy nilly! I tried to characterize this one's shape identity to be like the wild and untamed inner workings of the base's machinery! Imagine lots of pipes, ducts, etc.

So, I made a kinda simple maze, because fuck you I'm tired as SHIT, I've been working on this all night!! But yeah, kinda just do whatever you want! You can do something more linear, more complicated, or really whatever you want for a gauntlet type of area! This is where the level design becomes vastly more important while the map design takes a back seat! But it still HAS to be in a seat; it can't leave the car!

So, what do you get for beating Ridley? What is the final area going to be like?

...Up to you! I've already taught you everything you need to know about my process! If you want a final creative exercise, make a map for area 3! ...Or don't. You really don't need to. Just take what information you found valuable from me, and throw out the rest!

Now, onto...

CLOSING THOUGHTS

A few more quick things I wanted to mention before the end!

1: If you're making a full-sized game, be a bit more conservative with your space than I have here! Leave room to make sure you can fit everything you need to. Of course, you'll probably have more than just these two little areas to distribute the main content across.

2: Don't be afraid to use multiple area connections! Not only does it make the world feel alive, but they're important to make backtracking more enjoyable! The fun of backtracking is up to the level designer, but the map designer helps dictate the speed of it. Choose wisely! Always be aware of how fast you want the player to be moving place to place at any given time. Pacing is important; maybe try to slow things down mid-game to help the player digest everything so far before they head into the climax.

3: I don't advocate fully planning out your map before diving into the game. Definitely having something is better than nothing, but to make great art I think you've gotta REALLY get in there with your hands! Level design and map design and everything else should all be part of once process that weave together to make one whole; not stations on an assembly line that get thrown together at the end. Every decision you make for your hack will inform every other decision you make.

4: When you start doing level design, your plans for the map design WILL change (probably!). Don't be afraid to change things around, move things, delete things, even entirely revise whole sections of the game to suit your vision. Your plans are just that; plans. Plans sometimes change. They're not a holy bible for you to worship. You're not a lesser artist because you didn't get everything figured out on the first go. You're in fact a greater artist because you're refining your vision to be more true to your heart's desire!

and finally...

5: Do what's fun, do what feels right, do what you want. Remember: Rules are tools! Super Metroid isn't the masterpiece that it is because it's formulaic. It's wonderful and beloved equally for the ways it's odd and bizarre! It doesn't strictly follow one set of rules. Nothing does. It instead goes with the flow, and sometimes the designer digs different paths to flow in. But every fish is swimming in that same river! Don't be afraid to do something weird, something bizarre, something that every game designer will tell you is completely ass backwards and incorrect by every conceivable metric. If it's part of the vision you want to fulfill, then no one can tell you it's wrong! Follow your heart, listen to your gut, and understand your brain. They will all serve you well.

6: Don't be afraid to look at official games or hacks that you like for inspiration or guidance! Nothing's truly 100% original C:

Thank you for reading! I hope this helps clear up my perspective, Exister, and I hope it helps you and anyone else who may be reading this! Of course, this hasn't covered every single little nitty-gritty idea, opinion, or process I have; it's just the broad strokes. But I think it's enough to get the water wheel turning, so to speak!

To accompany our earlier analogy of silhouetted character designs, here's our silhouetted maps! Can you tell which is which? C:

MapMapper by ConCon
MapMapper is a program specifically designed for the purposes of making
grid-based maps for Metroid games. It's the favorite tool for ROM hackers and
and Metroid gamers everywhere!

How to Design a Great Metroidvania Map by Wes Fenlon
An article at PC Gamer detailing his interview with Hollow
Knight's developers regarding world design.

Mead brand Graph Paper Spiral Notebook at Amazon
100 sheets (200 pages) of graph paper, spiral-bound. The green notebook is the
least expensive, at 5.00 USD but the other colors aren't too much more.
Features a usable grid space of 38*52 cells. 0.03 USD per page.

Pen+Gear brand Graph Paper at Walmart
Another good cheap option for graph paper if available for you. 80 sheets
(160 pages) of graph paper for 2.44 USD. 0.02 USD per page.
Each page features a usable grid space of 41*29 cells, which should be
sufficient space for for most maps, though not in every situation. Due to the
actual usable grid space is closer to. This can be problematic, since the
smallest maximum screen dimension for most Metroid game maps is 32 tiles, and
for Super Metroid in particular maps can be 62*30. But, most maps in practice
probably won't hit this limit.

BIC brand Highlighters at Amazon

BIC brand Colored Pens at Amazon

HAIHAOMUM brand 2B Pencils at Amazon at Amazon
You probably already have pencils at home, but harder pencils tend to be easier
to erase. I suspect this would be the main reason to use a pencil over a pen or
marker.

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