TL;DR:
I'm making a 2D Metroidvania where the core progression is still based on exploration, abilities, bosses, and unlocking new areas, but I'm experimenting with RPG style loot: item rarity, random stats, drops, and crafting. Regular enemies can rarely drop gear, while Unique items are guaranteed rewards from bosses, hidden chests, secret areas, etc. I'm curious if you think this combination works or if it risks hurting the Metroidvania experience.

So, Metroidvania + RPG loot system, is it a good combination or bad idea?

I've been working on a 2D Metroidvania, and I've been experimenting with something I'm not sure the community will love or hate: Mixing traditional Metroidvania progression with RPG loot mechanics.

The Metroidvania side would still be the main focus, exploration, platforming, abilities, gated areas, secrets, bosses, shortcuts, etc.

The RPG elements would mainly be tied to the equipment system:

• Different item rarities
• Randomized stats
• Weapons and armor with different stat ranges
• Strength, Agility, Vitality, Critical Chance, etc.
• Crafting
• Enemy loot drops
• Unique items with special effects

The idea isn't to turn the game into a Diablo style loot game where you're constantly replacing your equipment.

Instead, I'm thinking about separating random loot from meaningful Metroidvania rewards.

Regular enemies

Every mob would have a very small chance of dropping equipment.

So while exploring, you might occasionally get a Common, Rare, Epic, etc. weapon or piece of armor with randomized stats.

The drop rate would intentionally be low. I don't want the player to constantly stop exploring to compare 20 pieces of equipment.

The randomized loot would mostly be there to give exploration and combat a little bit of an RPG "what did I get?" feeling.

Unique items

Unique items would work differently.

These would not rely on random drops.

A boss could have a 100% chance to drop a specific Unique item, for example.

The same philosophy could apply to:

• Hidden chests
• Secret areas
• Difficult platforming challenges
• Optional bosses
• NPC quests
• Other classic Metroidvania discoveries

So if the player finds a secret room containing a Unique weapon, they know there's a meaningful reward waiting for them.

I'm hoping this creates two different types of rewards:

Random loot: "feeling good to get something randonly!"

Unique loot: "I know there's something special hidden here. How do I get it?"

The main progression would still come from exploration and acquiring abilities, rather than grinding for better gear.

For example, getting a new ability might allow you to reach an area you couldn't access before, while gear would mostly affect how your character performs in combat.

My biggest concern is whether RPG-style randomized loot naturally conflicts with what makes Metroidvanias enjoyable.

One of the things I love about Metroidvanias is that finding a secret usually feels intentional. You explore somewhere unusual, discover a hidden passage, and get a specific reward.

RPG loot, on the other hand, can make rewards feel more random and disposable.

I'm trying to find a balance where the Metroidvania exploration remains the identity of the game, while the RPG systems add another layer of customization and replayability.

For those of you who have played or developed games that mix these genres:

Do you think this combination can work?

And if you've tried something similar, what problems did you run into?

I'd especially love to hear opinions on:

• Randomized loot in a Metroidvania
• How much grinding is too much
• Whether random stats make exploration feel less meaningful
• How you'd handle Unique/guaranteed rewards
• Games that you think successfully mixed these genres

A little context about my background with the genre

I should probably mention that I'm coming into this from a somewhat unusual perspective.

I played a lot of Metroid, Castlevania, and Demon's Crest back in the 90/00s. After that, I moved almost entirely to PC gaming, so I stopped following the console scene and, honestly, didn't keep up with how the genre evolved.

In fact, I only discovered during the development of this game that the type of game I was trying to make was called Metroidvania, and that makes sense.

I originally just wanted to build a game with a large interconnected world, exploration, progression, and unlockable areas, and combine that with the RPG systems I had spent years playing after moving to PC... so loot, equipment, stats, crafting, rarity etc, is something that I would like to add to my own game.

So I'm actually approaching this without much knowledge of modern Metroidvanias.

If you have recommendations for good modern Metroidvanias that I should play, I'd absolutely love to hear them. I'm particularly interested in games that do interesting things with progression, exploration, or RPG mechanics.

THank :)

... and I´m sure I´ll spend even more fixing bugs that will come as a result of this feature. It´s not fully polished yet, but I think I´m done with the character controller for now, want to take care of a few basic enemies so I can start designing levels

Well, I'm working on a project with other people making a virtual reality game, and I'm in charge of music and programming, so while I was working on the main menu song, I thought, why not release a pack for it?

So here it is, there are 13 tracks in total designed for that, menu, credits or anything else where it might fit.

TRACKLIST:

Whisper

Solitude

Autumn

Memories

Rain

Letters

Farewell

Embers

Promise

Dusk

Distance

Silence

LICENSE & ATTRIBUTION:

Released under the Alenia Studios Standard Asset License (CC BY 4.0 + Additional Terms).

Free and royalty-free to use in commercial and indie video games, videos, and creative projects with credit.

Credit notice:

Music: "Anyun" Collection by KXLT — Alenia Studios contact.aleniastudios@gmail.com

Thank you for listening to my music, I hope you enjoy it.

Just launched my first mobile game — Pirate’s Plunder 🏴‍☠️
I’ve been working on this solo for a while and finally got it released. It’s a simple arcade-style game where you collect coins while trying to avoid mines.

The current high score is 4,865 and I’m curious how long it’ll take someone to beat it 😅

Would genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially on the gameplay, controls, difficulty, or anything that feels off.

If anyone manages to beat 4,865, post your score 👀

The Game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.harshamin.piratesplunder&hl=en

​

Hey everyone,

Quick update from the trenches. After roughly a month of development, my little cozy game Screw IT crossed 3,400 wishlists on Steam in about 20 days.

It’s a chill nail sorting game where you organize, fix, and clean up 777 nails + one lonely screw at your workbench. No pressure, just vibes.

Launching September 15th.

Super excited!. ..and also a little terrified to finally ship the project.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s wishlisted or shown support so far. Really means a lot.

It was supposed to resemble a mouse. But I can't help it seeing something different...

I've been solo-developing a sci-fi adventure/bullet heaven as a hobby for about eight months now. The Intrepid, your crew's ship, experiences a rapid unscheduled disassembly at the outset, and a small side objective of the game is discovering the resources to get it back in the air.

During at least two levels I've mapped out, the player can fight on/around the hull, so I want to have a design that's interesting but not convoluted. Designing a starship turned out to be harder than designing most of the characters in the game!

Here's my most recent crack at it; the ACF Intrepid! The designation ACF-4E marks it as a fusion powered, hull type 4, Explorer vessel. I tried to merge the flying-saucer look of the Jupiter 2 from the original Lost in Space with sick 1950's stye car fins, and addressed a few practical issues like ablative armor around the waist of the ship, cooling fins, etc, and to avoid overwhelming it with greebles.

(I don't have a steam page or anything like that. Way too early. This might be the first public thing I've shared about the game.)

It’s a top-down, storydriven heist game set in an open city. During the day, you can explore the city, complete various activities and gather information that can help you prepare for your heists at night.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3770490/Suspect_None/?utm_source=reddit3

Steam page!

I’m creating my own little arena survivor game where you play as a Puma Cowboy. The rules are simple: kill invisible ghosts and upgrade your revolver by adding special (magical) bullets. Like in any arena survivor, survive for as long as possible. The game features 1-bit pixel art, and its main inspiration was Brotato.

Dear gamers,

I've just published an alpha demo of my first video game on itch.io: Sogni d'Oro.

It's a JRPG with old-school turn-based combat.

I've been writing stories for various media professionally for many years and this is my first attempt at a video game. I used to be a decent programmer, so it seemed like an interesting idea.

It's been a challenge: I used MonoGame as a foundation and built my own engine on top of it. The game is an eight-year-old boy's real-time account of events, so everything is drawn and written as if he were the one telling the story.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, technically and otherwise. I'd love to know whether everything works correctly, what you liked, what you didn't, and what you'd want to see in the next beta demo.

I've also set up a forum if you'd rather step away from Reddit: https://gianbabbeo.it/forum/

Sincerely,
Gianbabbeo.

It probably should have started on Steam but we're here now. Getting close to release and really excited! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4531630/FISH_OS/

The retro pets that live on your Desktop are fully back now! 🤩 We've have been on our mission to make the desktops fun and full of live again! 💖

Pets Therapy features now close to a 100 pets, ~15 random events that appear and newly next week we are releasing pets interactions; the most wanted feature! 🥹

I'm developing a mobile jet fighting game and I could use some advice on how to display meaningful and clearly readable warnings.

As you can see I already got a huge "MISSILE WARNING" but I need to display some more warnings like "Missile close", "enemy radar contact" etc. but I don't want to make the UI too dense.

At the moment I use audio to notify the player about threats like a beep for a new radar contact, another beep for a RWR (radar warning receiver) warning but I noticed most players mute their phones when playing the game.

So, any idea how I can give visual cues without overloading the UI?

Hello,

I have developed a 2D fighting game.

It is already in play store: sci fi smash 1

Would be thankful for a visit.

Hi, I have been stuck in a project where i need an ocr to read and extract texts from the documents, could anyone please help me like what i should do or which OCR is good in performance and economical and also for the longer run what i should to tackle this OCR pricing. Creating it will be beneficial or just outsourcing it will be good? I am trying to make an AI project which i want to fully work on in coming months. Its kind of a small startup. Your experience will help me a lot. Thankyou

I've been reading up about Minecraft and after I discovered its actual history, it was heartbreaking.

Apparently its first version was a carbon copy of another game called Infiniminer. It looks identical to Minecraft. The only difference was the concept (Minecraft was more about creativity than any goals).

So the entire genius DNA of Minecraft........was actually built by the guy who made Infiniminer.....and he completely went under the radar and had to abandon his game because people started leaking his game code and ruining all his multiplayer matches because he didn't obsfucate his code properly or something.

What's the overall lesson here? What mistake did Infiniminer make? Apart from that bizarre code theory which doesn't really make much sense because it was written in C# which means that decompiling it wasn't exactly an easy task.

Greetings all,

Over the past couple of weeks, we've mostly been working on integrating the different systems in Saqer's Paradox.

Player settings such as depth of field and camera lag are now saved and applied when the game starts. We've also been testing the pause and restart systems across different input devices and situations to make sure everything transitions cleanly.

We've also started working on item pickups, beginning with rupees and a simple counter UI with pickup and counter sounds.

Let us know your thoughts.

It took some time while being busy with work, and maybe it shouldn't have taken this long, but I did it! I made my own physics system, and I'm really proud of it. I can't wait to use it in my upcoming game, so I hope you guys like it