What happened to my new game's hub area

Hi! Last week I had started working on a hub area for my game. It was still in an early experimental stage, which I summed up with this sentence:

"If I find that this slows the pacing down too much, I'll try removing the hub areas and adding the player's [mail center building] to the world map instead."

A week later, it turns out that's exactly what happened. I ended up removing the hub area, although a few ideas from it still ended up making it into the game.

Why I was adding a hub area in the first place

I felt like a hub area would make the game feel a bit more like a continuous world, instead of a series of separate levels on a map screen. But why was that even something desirable in the first place? There were a few reasons, some of which were better than others:

1. The game's story was about a duck growing a delivery business, but you never actually got to see your business grow over the course of the game. The tutorial cutscene mentioned that you're starting a business, but after that you just spent the rest of the game flying around delivering things without seeing any evidence that your business was growing.
2. Flying around the hub area would let you practice your movement controls without any time pressure.
3. The audience for indie action games about exploring connected worlds (e.g. metroidvanias, action roguelikes) is much bigger than the audience for indie action games with tight level design (e.g. linear platformers, shmups). If you read any articles on indie game development, it's hard to avoid people giving this exact advice over and over again (e.g. this article from Derek Yu). So even if I didn't personally feel like a hub area made the game any better, it probably wouldn't make the game worse either so it was worth considering adding one.

After thinking about it for a while, the first reason was the only one I really cared about. The game doesn't need even more ways to let you practice your controls, because it already has a tutorial and a practice mode, and it makes you deliver flyers to each new area at your own pace before you can deliver in that area for real. And you can probably already tell that I don't really care about the third reason from the way I talked about it, haha.

Why I removed the hub area, and what I did instead

So the only real reasons to add a hub area were that it let you see that your business was growing over the course of the game, and that it might make more players buy the game.

But on the other hand, the hub area really messed with the pacing of the game. Hub areas aren't so bad in roguelikes where you spend a minute setting things up in the hub area before heading out on a thirty minute run, but the levels in this game all last around five minutes or less, so you were sent back to a hub area over and over again throughout the course of the game. Testing out a prototype hub area just made me wish that the world map menu was back.

I would rather just make the best game possible, instead of messing with its pacing to try and attract more of a mainstream audience (by indie game standards). But even if I wanted to sell out, the game is already way too arcadey and streamlined to attract the kinds of people who are into carefully exploring giant open worlds at their own pace. Adding a hub area would have just resulted in the arcade action fans being annoyed at how slow and bloated it was, and the slow-paced exploration fans being annoyed at all the arcade action stages.

Because of this, I removed the hub area. But I still wanted you to be able to see that your business was growing over the course of the game, so I made a few small changes:

There is now a picture of your mail center on the world map screen:

You now see a message on the world map when you unlock a new world:

As you progress further through the game, your mail center grows from its lemonade stand-esque beginnings into something bigger:

And the cutscenes where customers ask you to deliver special items now take place at your mail center:

These changes aren't very big, but they don't mess with the game's pacing at all and they still let you see your business grow. They were also much, much quicker to make than an entire hub area and all of the new code needed to support it. So I can take all of the time that I would have spent on a hub area, and spend it improving the other parts of the game instead! Sorry if you're one of the people who was excited about having a hub area, but hopefully one day I'll make an exploration-focused game that makes the most of these kinds of ideas instead of trying to cram them into a streamlined action game.

So with that, I've finished all of the changes that I wanted to make to the game before announcing it! I'm going to start making the game's music now, and then I'll make a trailer and let everyone know that the game exists. I'm pretty slow at composing music so it might take a while, but I'll do my best. Next week I'll let you know if I've made any progress on that front. In the meantime, let me know what you think of all of these changes!