It's been way over six years since I started working on what would eventually become Virtue's Heaven. The game went through many iterations, but throughout its cursed development there was one thing that stayed the same:
Movement should be expressive and exciting.
It was born out of a deep appreciation for maximalist mid-1990s action platformers and the frustrations I had with Metroidvania games and their insistence to lock cool movement abilities behind hours of needless progression.
I wanted a game, where you could explore a larger, connected space, without requiring players to collect several wardrobes full of movement upgrades in order to for the game to feel cool to play. And so, I created the most maximalist movement system I could think of.