Hollow Knight devs detail the process of creating the game's map

A portion of a PC Gamer interview with Ari Gibson, animator and co-director of Team Cherry and William Pellen, designer and co-director of Team Cherry...

Pellen: One of the earlier things we did was come up with the basic progression. All the character's abilities, and then we got them into a rough order. At the same time we were talking about the basic structure of the world. At the start it was basic: 'this is the shape of the world, and the characters are going to get these power ups in this specific order, what is the line, the path they take through the world to get those power-ups.' And then, from there, as the game expanded, we started to do things like change that power-up progression from a linear thing to section it out.

Gibson: Less linear, yeah. We chipped away at a lot of the hard gating in the game, to the point where a lot of those power-ups ended up being optional, anyway. And now people are speedrunning the game and getting barely any of the power-ups. Which is exactly what we had hoped.