A decade in the making, Clockwork Ambrosia reinvents how Metroidvanias fight

Metroidvanias may be one of the most popular genres in indie games, from Ultros to MIO: Memories in Orbit, to the point of oversaturation, but back when Nathan Hiemenz first began working on Clockwork Ambrosia over a decade ago, it was arguably a niche. Even then, it's still an unusual track, as he observes that the game is more influenced by the Metroid side, given its focus on range-based combat.

"In Super Metroid, you can combine weapon effects, so that you can put a wave effect that goes through terrain with another one that has a freeze effect, which was kind of simplistic but pretty cool for its time," Hiemenz explains. "So what if we took that concept but applied it to a more in-depth customizable rules-based system where we can add complete modifications to your weapons. It's almost like Slay The Spire in that you're almost building your weapon, even if it's not a deck, or theorycrafting your character in a game like Path of Exile, but on the scale of the weapon itself rather than your character."

While Hiemenz makes some interesting game comparisons there, classic 2D action-shooters like Metal Slug and Contra naturally also come to mind. The protagonist Iris, an airship engineer who crashes down onto the forbidden biomes Aspida, starts from simple blaster weapons that evolve to the point of having the over-the-top firepower of an army. You could also refer to Clockwork Ambrosia as a 'Megavania', in reference to Capcom's iconic 2D action-platforming shooter Mega Man, which had a direct influence.

The Mega Man influence

"I actually used Mega Man X as a baseline and reverse-engineered that flow for Clockwork Ambrosia's character movement," says Hiemenz. As a graduate of DigiPen's programming track, he was already accustomed to building his own engines. This was also a time when Unity wasn't as widespread in the games industry, which is why the game's development began and remained on a custom engine. This did, however, mean that when more people eventually joined the project, it would take longer for them to familiarise themselves with the engine's ins and outs.

"For this engine, it's basically on me to figure out what's going on, whereas if you go with Unity, they've run into that issue before and got it solved, so you don't have to worry about that," Hiemenz admits. "But I would say a benefit is you do have a little bit more control. [With Unity] There's a layer of abstraction, you can try to do things but you have to work within what they give you whereas we're at the metal. For example, we can literally just build a shader and then this is what these are all the capabilities that a shader could have and we have all of that directly at our fingertips."

Although Hiemenz doesn't consider himself a major artist (much of the game's visuals can be attributed to pixel artist Maciej Kuczynski), his knowledge and experience with pixel art, including dabbling with early sprite-based video game maker products like Multimedia Fusion, is also arguably why Clockwork Ambrosia embraces a retro aesthetic rather than the modern trend of Metroidvanias for hand-drawn animation.

"When my inspirations are like Super Metroid, a pixel-based game, I understand that type of art so I can communicate with the artists about what we're looking for and the best way to make the art work with the game itself as far as gameplay is concerned," he explains. "Art can actually be a big thing for a game as far as how readable it is, and so if an artist doesn't have an innate sense of that it can make things more difficult for players."

Which is to say that as appealing as retro-style aesthetics can be, it is also an important balance between form and function, and so there's a lot of detail in just weapons and effects to communicate the kind of builds and mods you've got for your weapons.

"There's a gun sprite that we show when you fire it and then there's unique art for what's being fired, as each weapon has its own distinct rules for how the projectiles work," Hiemenz continues. "That's definitely a fun part of the game for players, just having that experimentation. We offer that freedom because there's no real permanence to the game on the weapon side. You can play with things whenever you want and build up for the situation or just see what might happen if you put these things together."

Clockwork Ambrosia is releasing on PC this April, and you can download the demo on Steam.