alt Hacker NewsAnimal Well is a great game, there's a lot in there and I appreciate it when a game is deep rather than big but I don't see much connection there. Maybe it's like how "Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle" (a book I disliked immensely) inspired Tonda Ros to make "Blue Prince" a game which I enjoyed tremendously.
Animal Well wouldn't exist without Handmade Hero, Billy himself said it in an interview. The first game architecture he made was RAII etc and full of spaghetti and then he actually followed Handmade Hero and started to getting somewhere.