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[X3N]

Depends: if you've got walljumping or other cool movement tricks, it might be inadvertently easy to jump past all the obstacles.. or snag a spare bit of geometry on a wall and reach ground, allowing you to jump again. I think it wouldn't change the basic logic, but it would require more polish / testing.

In Super Metroid, you could already use the walljump to sequence break the game pretty brutally. Technically speaking, a TRUE metroidvania would have to have opportunities for sequence breaking. Metroid Zero Mission on the GBA even went so far as to add opportunities for sequence breaking, and a special ending for breaking the game and getting a really low item collection score.

Do people consider Blaster Master a Metroidvania? The basic gameplay was there: each boss drops an item you need to reach the next world. A procedurally generated version of Blaster Master would probably be pretty easy to make.

-SirNiko

I should play SuperMetroid Zero again.

That's true.. and yeah, sequence breaking is awesome - or at least the possibility for multiple roads leading the same way (like the scattering of missiles in Super Metroid.. not the same as being able to say, get different items in the first Zelda but yeah).

When Metroid Prime was re-released, they took OUT the sequence breaks  
..I think it's bad if you can do ridiculous skips, though. Like maxing out speech and stealth and getting the Power Armor in Fallout 2 .. then massacring the rest of the game world getting the items you need to win. Some kind of checks and balances would be needed.

EDIT: I haven't played Blaster Master. Looking up YT

[SirNiko]

Blaster Master is an NES game. There are sequels on the original Game Boy, Genesis and PS1, but those games are not the same. You want the NES version of Blaster Master.

-SirNiko

[Daiz]

Speaking of Metroidvanias and sequence breaking, some of you might know of a game called Bunny Must Die / Chelsea and the 7 Devils. I managed to sequence break the game so that I skipped the first boss and first item (dash boots) completely and played as far as you could get. It breathed some fresh challenge into the game since the dash boots are a pretty vital item in some areas of the game. The new solutions to these places usually involved very creative walljumping. Unfortunately you can't beat the game without beating the first boss since one door won't disappear without doing so and if that door isn't gone you can't enter the final boss area (you can actually get to the entrance, but like I said, it's closed).

Here's a pretty screenshot for those who have played it:



So the moral of the post is that sequence breaking in Metroidvanias is awesome, especially if you've 100%'d the game before doing a sequence break run

[Gimym TILBERT]

Google ashmore thesis 

[X3N]

Google ashmore thesis 

This?
http://www.emoware.org/evolutionary_art.asp

[Gimym TILBERT]

THIS!

http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/16823

This project is an attempt to model and simulate key and lock puzzles in the style of Shigeru Miyamoto games, specifically the Zelda and Metroid series. Much of the gameplay in these titles is oriented around encountering obstacles, and then locating an item that allows the player to circumvent the obstacle. The project is built on top of Charbitat, another project built on Unreal Tournament 2004, which produces procedurally generated space in response to the player's actions.

[X3N]

Niice.

[Gregory]

I don't know if you want to do things like I'm doing them, but I generate a world composed of "sectors" (Norfair would be a sector), and grow each sector by starting with one room, then connecting a new room to a random room in a random direction.  Rooms can be various sizes.  At the moment, the map generated looks kinda cool, but does lack the unity of feel that you get in a more authored game.  One thing I do to try and make the world seem more unified is use a different tileset for each sector, so that they look very different even though they have the same underlying layout possibilities.  At the moment, I'm avoiding shortcuts as they're trickier than they seem.

Mine's still very much a work in progress; I think having sector themes would be interesting.  They'd work like, say, Yu's Spelunky worlds, where each sector had totally different layout options.  Puzzles are more complicated, of course.

One thing that I've found out about procedural generation is the awesomeness of combination.  If you create 16 different options for something, you only have 16 options and the game might seem repetitive.  However, if you create 8 "column A" options and 8 "column B" options, you suddenly have 64 final combinations, and there's far more variety.  That probably sounds obvious to a lot of people, but it was a bit of an epiphany when I first grokked it.

[SirNiko]

One point we haven't addressed: how many 'keys' (which in Metroid would be weapons and movement upgrades) are there, and how many are used?

For example, you might make a game with four zones and four upgrades. The upgrades always appear in the same order, so you always get the high jump first in the grass zone (because the grass zone always comes first) then use it to enter the fire zone for the missiles, and so on. The terrain in the zone is randomly generated, but the order of the major events is always the same.

Or maybe you make the same game, but now the four upgrades are obtained in a random order. One game you start with the missiles, and the high jump is last. Another round starts with the speed dash, and you need to go without missiles until the last zone. This has more variety, but it also means a more sophisticated generator that can create terrain that accounts for all the various permutations of equipment.

Or, maybe you make a game with 10 different upgrades, but in a single play through only 4 of them appear. I think, in that case, you'd wind up either smartly designing obstacles for every possible permutation of 1, 2, 3 and 4 items, or making generic obstacles that can be navigated with some or none of the items (in which case, it'd be almost like Spelunky with more backtracking). Neither of these are difficult to do, just time consuming and requiring a lot of testing to make sure that the obstacles can't be sequence broken easily.

On a personal note, I think this might be fantastic for a minesweeper sized game, whereas before I was thinking of something long and complicated that would otherwise be a pretty terrible waste of programming. "Metroid: Fun Size Edition" might actually make for a good concept.

-SirNiko

[Mr. LL]

I think the best approach is to have a "pool" of upgrades, enemies, terrian types, etc. to pull from. Have a seed or something that can be changed that alters how many types of each are pulled and such, then generate the map around the "expected" upgrade order (the order of which the upgrades are pulled from the "pool") and then you could have it generate a final area where all the upgrades are needed to get past.

I'm no expert on this but that approach makes the most sense to me 

[X3N]

I think the best approach is to have a "pool" of upgrades, enemies, terrian types, etc. to pull from. Have a seed or something that can be changed that alters how many types of each are pulled and such, then generate the map around the "expected" upgrade order (the order of which the upgrades are pulled from the "pool") and then you could have it generate a final area where all the upgrades are needed to get past.

I'm no expert on this but that approach makes the most sense to me 

Yeah, I like that. In the academic article they mention "optional" power-ups. You'd have to have some logic for accounting for different values of total power-ups used I think, with a few specific cases.. eg. with only 2 power-ups there's not a lot of variance

[Parthon]

I call these Metroguevanias.

I have one in design, but it got put in hold over the christmas break, I should start work on it again.

[X3N]

I call these Metroguevanias.

I have one in design, but it got put in hold over the christmas break, I should start work on it again.

Care to talk about it?

[Parthon]

Oops, I meant to reply to this.

There's not much to say really. The design called for generating a map for the world, then using that to generate the stages.

It was really just a way to experiment with a PCG platformer in the form of a metroidvania.

Btw, Droqen's Probability 0 is an awesome PCG platformer. http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9224.0

[Parthon]

I've started work on it.

I've got a simple random-step stage generation going, which is going to be quickly replaced and tinkered with.

Tomorrow is physics and game stuff, so I'll be able to jump around and shoot and hump the walls and what not. Then see where to go from there.

I might go make another thread about it.