Geek Critique: Questions for Milton Guasti

1) One big criticism I have concerns the intro. Specifically how it kind of splits the difference between Super/Fusion's long, detailed intros, and Zero Mission's abrupt, briefer affair. It doesn't feel like it communicates what it needs to, particularly because it doesn't mention the research and rescue teams. However, I imagine that due to the time it took to create specialized art, this is something that would have been put on the backburner so that the game itself could be focused on, and that perhaps the team planned to expand it in a future release. Is that accurate?

1) The main function of the intro was to show non-Metroid players what a normal Metroid looks like, and to explain what your mission is. Besides production values, I thought new players would get bored easily with a lot of text, and Metroid veterans wouldn't learn anything new from a long intro.

2) At one point in the script, I refer to the Hydro Station music as an "original composition." However, I know some of these themes are remixes from the Prime series, which I haven't played yet. So! Is the Hydro Station wholly original?

2) That song is a remix of this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwgmj84q9z8
It's a distinct remix of it, but it's not original.

3) My least-favorite section of the game was the second part of the Industrial Complex. I _loved_ the first half, but I felt like the lighting gimmick was overused, and it was frustrating wandering around in the dark for that long. I also didn't think it was well-integrated into the theme of the first half. Am I missing anything in particular about this section, or could you speak to its development?

3) By the time you reach that zone, you already battled a lot of Alphas and enough Gammas to know how to handle them. You likely have Super Missiles, so you're capable of taking out a Gamma Metroid with 2 well placed shots. The natural progression that felt like the next step in difficulty (without adding new Metroid types) was to limit the player's sight. I made sure to not overdo it, though. The light dims gradually as you get deeper, and you get to fight just a couple Gammas in pitch black rooms. It's supposed to add tension and uncertainty to the environment, so I understand if you found the place unpleasant to explore.
As for the theme, it follows the original layout and room placement. I couldn't think of anything particularly distinct for the place lore wise, nor it was a priority.

4) Probably the biggest criticism I'm going to raise is this one: Making the Alpha and Gamma fights more dynamic and better-designed was the OBVIOUS thing to do, but it didn't solve the problem of them being repetitive. Instead, because there are so many Alpha and Gamma Metroids and each fight now takes substantially longer, it made the problem WORSE. Do you have any thoughts on that? And on a related note, were the Metroid evolutionary fights designed in order? That is, did you have the Alpha fights _mostly_ complete, then you started work on the Gammas, and so on?

4) Yes, they are a bit too repetitive. Even if the terrain around some of the fights is interesting, some of them take forever if you run out of Super Missiles.
The Alphas were pretty much complete when I tackled the Gammas. Alphas can be configured with custom speed, accelerations and behaviors for each encounter. So their difficulty curve is carefully implemented. Gammas had similar parameters, but just the grab move is disabled sometimes.

5) Is there some narrative reason, beyond the fact that the door locks behind her, that Samus NEEDS to use a power bomb to set off the explosion sequence?

5) Nope. Just a random locking door to ensure the player experiences a cool escape sequence. The text in the log was kept fairly short, and an emphasis was put into mentioning the damaged power cell. But that's about it.

6) Are the particle-exploding robots in the Distribution Center officially called "beam bots"?

6) I call them Danmaku Bots, but I didn't think of a cool official name for them.

7) I noticed the GFS Throth site is very wide-open, yet very derelict. Aside from the boss and a few upgrades lying right out in the open, there's almost nothing there. The music makes it feel all the more empty, which is why I saw this as an intentional design choice. Was it?

7) The Thoth was redesigned a couple times. It began as a playground for the sprite artists, to design the ship interior as they pleased and practice their skills. At one point the ship was about twice as big, and many rooms would have scan events that would describe them. It was all part of a scrapped subplot that would hint at a corrupt Galactic Federation group cleaning up traces of the Metroid operation. We ended up scrapping that, it was too cliché, and we decided to shift the narrative to describe the golden age of the Federation.
In the end, we left 2 scan events, and the rest of the area is used for environmental storytelling.

8) SEGA hired a fan called "The Taxman," who created an open engine that recreated the physics of the classic Sonic games, and he's now one of the lead developers for that series' 25th anniversary game, Sonic Mania. On the extremely unlikely chance that Nintendo were to have a change of heart and give you a similar opportunity, or even just wanted you to bring AM2R to the Switch, would you be interested?

8) Of course. It'd be an honor.

9) AM2R is very much a complete overhaul of Metroid 2. How much of that 10-year development time was spent designing all the new bosses and art assets? How much faster do you think it could have been done if you'd just redrawn the tiles from the Game Boy version and added a map and a modern game engine?

9) The game began with a much more simple scope. It was going to be just that, a straight remake of the map and maybe add some Zero Mission abilities.
Then Metroids had to be made smarter, because Samus could take them out in seconds. I picked tiles from Zero Mission for each area, making them distinct. I had to draw some myself. When I was going to release the first AM2R demo, I had a completed first area. Adding a "Demo End" trigger would be anticlimactic, so I added a small miniboss to make a proper demo end. As more demos were released, the standard of what areas were was raised a lot.
Places had a certain theme (sometimes with game mechanics involved), lots of polish and at least a miniboss.
If I had stuck to the original scope, the game would have released 5 years ago, but it would have been very repetitive. And people would have forgotten about it by now.