Your work always impresses me! Maybe a weirdly random thing to say, but if an opportunity to collaborate ever arose, I'd jump at the chance

All this to say, even though I've only done Metroidvania-type stuff the past 2 years, I'd like to not let doing this kind of music slip away from me

Your piece for this is what originally got me to follow, but I had no idea it was part of Ode to Castlevania. Genuinely awesome

that is to say, tastemakers have opinions on how game music should or shouldn't be, and/or musical idioms/traditions get imported from specialists in other forms of media, e.g. film, stage, and so certain frameworks and "standards" pop out

I'm just sort of talking here, but though the reason why this is the case is probably many-sided, I wonder if the "institutionalization" of game music isn't partly responsible for the waftiness of modern VGM

Design goals in the MVs I've played/seen largely riff on the more "concrete" flagbearers of the genre, e.g. movement, combat, item acquisition, etc. but I think map architecture, for as large as a cumulative effect it can have, is a worthwhile thing to think about on its own terms

The same is true of some other games I've studied, like Symphony of the Night vs. Circle of the Moon

The two maps are of course different at a glance, but they're also different in many principles

But an abstract, relational thing that has a cumulative effect on the overall experience and perception of the game

This all said, I generally don’t think map design is thought of in this way, but Dread v. SM taught me that map design — or maybe better to say map architecture — is one of those things that an average player can’t necessarily point to

In spite of Brinstar having a great map design, and Cataris, imo, less so, I wouldn’t bet on either to have been deliberately designed as such, so much as byproducts of other design goals, like Dread trying to minimize backtracking

This all to say, Brinstar feels — to me at least — easy to explore, if tedious. Now, try to think of a simple, consistent strategy to visit every node on the Cataris map. If you’re like me, you’ll probably struggle!

Once you see how that works, you might notice that’s, at least in my experience, generally how people navigate mazes too: they reach a dead-end and then return to the nearest juncture and go down another path until all “branches” off that juncture have been searched

In computer science, the way a computer searches a tree structure (e.g. a classic mouse & cheese maze) is with what’s called a depth-first search, which you can go to the wiki for “Depth-first search” and go down to the example section to see in action

The really special thing about the Brinstar map is it’s basically a tree structure: a series of nodes with separate, non-intersecting branches