Afterimage dev on making their game stand out from other Metroidvanias
The spitting afterimage
There’s certainly no shortage of Metroidvania games these days, and Afterimage is one of the newest that just launched on Switch last week. In a space that’s so full of indie offerings, how did the team behind the game differentiate themselves from the rest? In a new interview with Nintendo Life, the game’s executive producer Ziliang Yang elaborates on some of the team’s methods. One of the foremost and most obvious examples is the game’s beautiful art style.
At what point in the development process did you decide on Afterimage’s gorgeous hand-drawn visual identity?
It’s rather difficult to pin down the timing of this. We experimented with several different approaches to Afterimage’s visual style, and we eventually chose something we felt would distinguish Afterimage from the genre’s more popular aesthetics — something light and colorful.
Was there anything you or the team particularly struggled with designing or incorporating into the game?
When we were experimenting and finding our own visual style, we encountered a problem where we wanted to make a Metroidvania with bright environments. But in scenes where the overall scenery was relatively bright, there might be issues with differentiating between the character and the foregrounds and backgrounds. Integrating the entire environment while ensuring the gameplay experience was easily understandable was a hard challenge early in development.
The art in Afterimage certainly does a good job making this look different from many other Metroidvanias available today. Yang also discusses giving the game’s protagonist a unique worldview and making the areas of the map feel connected in a meaningful way.
Click here to read more about the development of Afterimage, which is available right now on the Nintendo Switch eShop.
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