Networks in the Game “Hollow Knight”
Hollow Knight is a popular indie game that was released in 2017. The game is structured like any other 2d platformer game, except the entire thing takes place in one massive level that the player can move around through acquiring various movement abilities, such as a double jump or a super dash. This megalevel, however, is made up of several different areas. The different areas are shown below as they appear in-game, with each one being denoted by a different color.
What you may have noticed by now, is that this series of areas is a network. Each area connects to a certain number of other areas, and some are more well-connected than others. I am going to do a thorough investigation of this network and of the connectivity of each area with two goals in mind. The first one is to see which area is the most well connected. This may seen somewhat irrelevant, but besides just knowing which area opens up most of the game, this is useful information because in multiplayer hide-and-seek mods of the game, switching areas makes it a lot harder for a pursuer to track you. Secondly, you may notice two “tubes” on this map, one near the bottom above the large gray area and one closer to the top below the pink area. These are tramways, and you need a special item to ride the tram. Through this analysis, I would like to try to figure out why the developers put the tramways where they did (because they could have theoretically been anywhere), and how it affects the overall connectivity of the map. Below is the map as a network of nodes, with the blue lines indicating normal passageways and the red lines indicating passages only accessible by trends.
Using this visual network, I plugged each area into a spreadsheet, and calculated the average distance to any other given area of the map with and without tramways. The results of those calculations are pictured below.
So, some results are unsurprising. First of all, the most well-connected area is the fungal wastes, which was rather predictable due to how centrally located it is and how it has 6 connections, more than any other area. City of Tears and Forgotten Crossroads are also unsurprisingly 2 and 3, as they each have the second largest number of connections at 5 (though crossroads has 6 with a tram). City probably beats crossroads out by a bit because it’s closer to the center of the map. Royal Waterways, though, is able to tie with Crossroads without trams despite having fewer direct connections, again probably due to its advantageous positioning. Also unsurprisingly, the Abyss has the lowest connectivity of any area, due to it being only directly connected to the Ancient Basin, and located at the very bottom of the map. So, if you want to be in a well-connected area, City of Tears, Fungal Wastes, Forgotten Crossroads, and Royal Waterways are probably your best bets, and you’ll want to avoid The Abyss.
These statistics also bring to light some interesting things about tramway placement. We don’t see the connectivity of the graph as whole improving a huge amount (most of the improvements made change average connectivity by less than .1), but we do see some areas changing a large amount. The best example of this is Deepnest, which saw a massive improvement of .5 and went from the 9th most well connected area to the 4th. Ancient Basin (and by association the abyss), Kingdom’s Edge, and Resting Grounds all saw huge improvements, which makes sense as these are the areas the tramways are directly connected to. However, the tram is also connected to forgotten crossroads, which, due to already being very well-connected, has almost no change to its connectivity. It’s also interesting to note that City of Tears, Fungal Wastes, and Royal Waterways, three of the most well-connected areas, are not affected at all by the addition of tramways. This leads me to the conclusion that the tramways were placed where they are to make isolated areas less isolated, especially ones like Deepnest and Basin near the bottom of the map. This overall makes these areas feel less isolating / trapping, while also making the map feel more connected in general.