Project: Acenn a 2D Metroidvania Style Game

[Jmrhdb]

A quick point on the gameplay front. The "Save Station" looks incredible and the animation is completely gorgeous. However, it does go on a bit. I can imagine loving it the first time I saw it, then quickly getting to resent it as I see it run through for the nth time. I could also imagine avoiding using a save just because I'll have to wait so many seconds to do it.

Metroidvanias happen to be my favourite kind of platform game. Possibly my favourite kind of game. But if I compare the save point in Axiom Verge for example (several seconds) to Hollow Knight (probably less than a second, if you don't want to hang around) or Ori & the Blind Forest (just a long button press) I much prefer the latter two.

But that's an opinion and nothing more, take it with a pinch of salt.

A more objective way to think about it might be putting it in the context of the game. Is gameplay going to be fast and frenetic? Or slow and methodical exploration? If the latter it may make more sense in context. If the former, it may be a bit incongruous.

Anyway, I'll be watching this with interest. Not least because I'm also in the first stages of putting a Metroidvania together.

You make a great point! I didn't even think about how annoying it would be to watch a long animation every time you went to save.
To fix this, after the player has saved and watched the animation once (there's more to the save stain then just going into a container and being scanned but i don't have any presentable artwork at the moment. It has more to do with the story of the game) the next time it will be insanely skip-able after committing to the save.
Again thanks for the feedback!

[eishiya]

Don't make players have to press a button to skip a common long animation, it's annoying, and easy to miss. Instead, consider a "short animations" toggle in the options menu, like Final Fantasy X had for its summons. When enabled, animations are played fully the first time, but on subsequent times, greatly shortened versions are played. For the save station, this could be a sped up version of the opening and closing, perhaps with the steam puff frames cut out (they'd look silly sped up xP).