Posted March 10, 2024 by adammcdonald
#boss fight #shmup #metroidvania #action #shooter #pixel art
In the last month or so, I've had a few things going on with this project.
Boss Fight
I have never really made a boss fight, but I know I want this game to have them. I made an attempt to start making boss fights two times previously for this game, and both times I felt like I couldn't really get a strong foothold and quickly decided to focus on other things instead. This time, it feels like things are sticking and I'm making progress. I started with an initial idea for a stationary weak point with a variety of defences to test the player's skills and require a sampling of their toolkit. As I started blocking that into a level, trying to see how it feels to engage with a fight like that, the fight quickly evolved. I have landed for now on a pair of boss enemies that move on the sides of the screen and fire at the player in the middle, with a couple of electrical hazards to make things interesting.
Here is a video of the early WIP. Check out the sick music! My audio guy went ahead and composed a boss tune a while ago, and I think it slots in nicely here.
It may not look like much so far, but under the hood I have set up a state machine for a few different attack patterns and I know exactly where the tips of each turret are and where they're pointing. I need to create the actual projectiles for the attacks, get those states switching based on some kind of logic (likely a pattern that increases in speed/intensity as the fight goes on), and then from there do a lot of testing, validating and revising. This will be my main focus for dev work for a little bit, but hoping it doesn't drag on too long.
Art Stuff
I brought the game to Full Indie in Vancouver this past February, and got some great feedback. A couple of people well-versed in UI/UX were able to give me a lot of great feedback on the UI stuff I had been doing. One note I continue to get is on art, mainly that the background and foreground are not clearly separated. I made some attempts to remedy this, but decided to enlist some help from an artist friend who is beginning to help on the project. I have already implemented his sketch of the "cockpit screen" (see February update), but let him know that background art is a higher priority than polishing that piece. I spent a decent chunk of time this month just making sure I get him some strong reference and direction for how I want the game to look and feel, as he is basically beginning to contribute art to the project just now.
Looking back on my past year of progress, a lot of it is actually art related. Though I've learned a lot, I'm not totally happy with the look of the game and I would rather spend time on designing and coding the game.
Giving a Talk
At the monthly Full Indie event, two volunteer speakers will get up on stage and give talks. I had an idea for one floating around in my head for a while, and decided to bite the bullet and sign up. The general idea I had was talking about how I keep hobby game dev interesting and fun with a busy life. This was a bit of a roller coaster for me, as my confidence in my idea quickly took a nose dive as I sort of lost the plot and almost turned it into basically a career biography about myself, my failed indie games and my career in the game industry. I ended up narrowing my focus and landing on the ideas of working consistently and sustainably within a busy schedule, breaking down what has worked about my workflow in the past couple years and why I seem to be able to keep pushing on this project with seemingly endless motivation. Despite confidence in the topic, I really started to doubt myself about it. Do I really have any authority on this? I haven't even finished a game using this method. I've never done much public speaking... can I even hold it together and hold people's attention?
The talk seemed to go well though! I got laughs where I hoped to get laughs, got lots of great questions at the end, and had several people come up to me at the event (or message me afterwards) saying it was a great talk. There should be a video posted at some point, as they typically do post videos of the talks and I know it was recorded.
Looking Forward...
Some notes on what I have planned for the next little bit.
I think I said something in February about quick updates each month. This one feels kinda long. Oh well.