While all Metroidvania games tend to share certain features and mechanics inherent to the genre, like ability-gated backtracking, Biomorph faced some unprecedented challenges due to its unique core mechanic. The game's titular Kirby-like "biomorph" ability lets players take the form of enemies they've defeated, allowing them to attack or move in entirely different ways. Naturally, this seriously complicated Lucid Dreams' approach to Biomorph's combat, exploration, and enemy design.

In an interview with Game ZXC, Lucid Dreams' co-founders Maxime Grégoire and Francis Lapierre discussed some of the unforeseen challenges that arose thanks to the bimorph mechanic, such as coping with a potentially changing player hitbox. They also weighed in on how the team approached enemy design in general, keeping in mind that players both fight and become these creatures.

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Contact Damage in Biomorph Was Tricky To Balance

While Metroidvania games share many similarities, one slight mechanical change that can drastically alter their feel is the inclusion or absence of contact damage: when the player takes damage by merely touching enemies, such as in Mario. Controls need to be extremely tight for contact damage to feel fair and there shouldn't be any guesswork involved in collision detection. A game like Hollow Knight with its persistently-sized protagonist is straightforward with contact damage, but it quickly became apparent that Biomorph's shapeshifting mechanic made this difficult.

Another challenge that we had that we didn’t see coming but quickly became apparent was that we made the game with contact damage. You always have two choices: you have damage on contact or just from attacks. Contact damage works well in Hollow Knight because it's simple to understand and you can create fun patterns. It works well when you have one shape, one character.

But in Biomorph , you can have bigger monsters, and smaller monsters, so the damage on contact with the touch distance was challenging to pull off because with big monsters, we had to add bonuses to the touch distance so they’d clear enemies because they have a bigger hitbox. So combat was complicated to pull off and to bring to a state where you can have actual fun with all the monsters without feeling too constrained.

Since the character can shapeshift into several creatures during combat, it's difficult to retain the same muscle memory collisions as a persistent character. Along with some under-the-hood parameter tweaks, one clever solution was to have Harlo shapeshift to his standard form whenever performing a dodge. This way, the dodge distance and invincibility frames are consistent no matter what form Harlo took originally.

Biomorph's Shapeshifting Mechanic Made Interesting Enemy Design Crucial

Few elements are more important than combat in a Metroidvania, and coming up with enemies that are interesting to fight is an important part of the equation. Since players can also become these enemies, Biomorph had to take extra care when designing them so they'd be fun in both situations.

The best way we approached it is that every zone has a theme: a main feature like some mechanics that we want and we wanted every biome to be different. Once we settled on the mechanic, we created the enemies and thought about their shape and what they could do that helped create this unique feeling in this biome.

Since the player becomes the monster and uses the monster’s attacks–with some tweaks of course–we had to be careful to balance the difficulty and the abilities to be fun to fight against, but you'll want to kill it just to take its shape and see if you do it yourself. So first we started the monster to make them fun, and then we took the monster and and ported it to the player and tuned the weapon and abilities to give the feeling of the monster but still feel good as a player controller.

The result is a roster of enemies that tend not to repeat themselves mechanically or thematically, and this enriches the game in several ways. Open-world exploration is more interesting thanks to a more diverse cast of monsters, players are more motivated to unlock and collect each unique transformation, and combat throughout the game stays fresh.

Biomorph

Lucid Dreams Studio's Biomorph is a Metroidvania with puzzles, platforming, and combat. In Biomorph, the protagonist can take on the shape of enemies, allowing them to use their skills against other monsters.