Goodness, animals are not doing well...The game is funded by Bigmode, an outfit created by popular YouTuber Dunkey, and quotes it as "exposing some of the best games" as launching to near-universal acclaim, Breakout metaweed has teed itself up to become the next hollow knight. 

There was a lot of irony back then, but I would be damned — he really simply published a good game, not bad.  

The success of the game, however, is largely down to the solo dev Billy Basso's Animal Wells Maestro who made Dan a thing. As if making Animal Well wasn't impressive enough, he also said in an interview with a friend of Edge magazine (as part of the latest issue) that there was a lot of room at the design stage,

"Designing a metroid vanya is much more difficult than designing a linear platformer that can load a stage, for example." "I think it's a good idea," Basso told Edge. "Putting a new room on the map is the first step, and you just have to play it and try it out and probably go through five or six iterations..."

Building these rooms is a "super-repetitive" process, explains Basso, before revealing (in the same air of a genius writer, casually pointing to a bin full of manuscripts) that he "designed at least twice as many rooms as they are in the game." The main map is like 16x16-256. So I would probably say that while designing more than 500 rooms, while making this game, it was cut or modified beyond recognition."

Indeed, it's probably a mark of Basso's skill as a developer who knew what he needed to go through — not all ideas are good, even good ideas that don't serve as part of the whole, but it's still an impressive amount of darling to kill. 

It is something even more experienced, a large team is well understood—like Larian Studios, for example, who scrapped the whole mechanic you would fight your way out of the Fugue plane after every death just because it was not very clicked. If it is not working, don't fix it: just get rid of.