Day 22 - Graveyard Boss Progress, Lava Level & Roadmap
How is everybody doing? I've been having a blast reading about your projects and working on mine! For today we are going to talk about the graveyard level, its corresponding boss, the first lava level (of two), and the future in a little more detail. Let's start with the graveyard level first since I have the least to say on that.
The Graveyard
Yesterday I shared a new screenshot of the graveyard level and it looks pretty good. A reminder below. However, I wanted to provide general notes as to what it features here:
- One moderately challenging encounter with the chance for the player to obtain a new ally!
- Minor balance changes made to ally & Hiro's weapon.
- If she dies, the opportunity is lost and the level is cut short.
- If she lives the player chooses to have the unit join the party (recommended).
- Fun note about how I name characters for HIro's Ascension, they ALL have a special meaning. Example, Hiro has several meanings in Japanese depending on the Kanji used. In this case, his name means, "prosperous" since it would be written with the 浩 character. Not all names are Japanese, however, the world of Hiro's Ascension is a melting pot and mirrors our own! I'm not going to give you the woman's name here though, you'll have to discover that for yourself and what her name means, along with the others ;)
- Regardless of choice a secondary fight of hard difficulty begins.
- Option to explore the graveyard once all fighting has ceased.
- Currently, there is a two-step, "puzzle" hidden on the map. I would like to add more to this but due to time that's all I could manage for now. Updated this to include a tutorial because I realized that the player hasn't seen a particular event item in this game yet. The puzzle involves an easy riddle as a hint if you don't happen to stumble upon the solution on your own.
- Each grave (with the exception of one, huh that's weird...) has an epitaph or general description (in the case of the wooden crosses). Some are silly, some are for actual people I know who died, and others might have more meaning than they let on.
That's it for that level. I know I said I didn't have much to say but O.o
Graveyard Boss
Yesterday I also hinted about the boss for this floor. Remember, you are going into this fight injured, and maybe even alone! I wouldn't worry too much though because not everything in Hiro's Ascension is what it seems after all. I am really excited for people to experience this boss because he's not something you would traditionally see in a tactics oriented strategy game. While this is in no way original in that this sort of thing has been done before, I still think it will be quite unexpected. Alright, no more hints on this guy. Instead, let me talk about why his level isn't done yet.
Remember yesterday when I said he had a lot of coding because of how chatty he was? Well I am not kidding! So far each instance of conversation with this guy is anywhere between 20-100 lines of (again, this is visual coding in-engine) various dialog, logic, and much more. There is a lot going on under the hood here, even though when you play this out, you really couldn't tell. I probably don't need to tell you folks making games that, but if you've never made one before, that's a LOT of what goes into games and why they take so long. You need to make sure all this is working smoothly and that there aren't funky bugs going on either.
As it stands he is 3/10 of the way completed because I am going to work on him in little chunks at a time. Doing him all at once is really exhausting! Thankfully, each time I add something new, I can copy large chunks of code and make minor (just tedious) edits to things since a lot of this stuff follows specific patterns. Kind of nice when you have something that works like this! Doubly good is that all the new mechanics like this one I'm including are easy to duplicate once finished fully, so the final boss, which pulls from each floor you explore to form his patterns, will be fairly easy to assemble.
That's it for this one right now. I suspect that by the start of the weekend he will be either complete or 8/10 done.
Lava Level
As part of my break from the Graveyard boss I decided to work on the fire-themed floor. The first level's map looks like this:
This is without enemies and lighting may change of course. I know it is a bit silly to have wooden bridges over lava, but they play nice with the lava tiles so they were what ultimately won out here. If I find something better as I go, I'll change that but for now this is good enough. They are nice and narrow and do a great job of splitting the map into two uneven parts. So what's going down in this level?
- Another ally opportunity!
- This time for an archer. His name is not settled yet, I have to research a good name for him.
- He'll be mobbed by some demons that keep popping out of the lava. You'll need to rescue him by giving him an opportunity to escape! Since he is a ranged fighter, he will be useless if mobbed or in melee range. If you manage to save him, he will offer to join your party.
- I want to add this here, but may skip it depending on how difficult the fight is.
- Introduces environmental effects (if you aren't protected of course).
Not a terribly complex level but it will make a good prelude to the boss. In that encounter you'll be fighting a fire-wielder who has phase based mechanics. He's shaping up to be pretty tough, especially if you go into this solo. The game is balanced to always have 1-2 people in your party so I can't guarantee you'd win by yourself (I won't be testing it that way). As it stands, everything so far is doable by yourself but you should really consider friends if you ask me!
Last thing for this, I talked about how my composer finished up the music for the boss here. Go ahead and give this a listen (follow him and like this too if while you are at it, he's super awesome):
Roadmap
Moving forward I know for sure I'll be able to complete all of the above. I want to give the player a choice after defeating the gravekeeper where they'll either get the fire level or another level (I have an ice level and woodland level planned out) but I'm not 100% confident I can get that all finished by Monday at the absolute latest. For the moment I have a placeholder which offers a, "pseudo" choice with a developer's note. This is purely for the sake of the contest. I would love to continue work on this project, even if it does not win. However, I do want the player to have some agency in how they drive the story and where they end up going, so I am including this as if the feature is complete (even if I don't manage to complete it in time) because this contest is asking for a vertical slice. Meaning, if I want it in the full game, it NEEDS to be here.
In addition to this, I'll add in new game + but it will have zero playable content. Instead, it will play a short cutscene and have a developer note. More details on this later because this is actually a very important feature in terms of my story. I don't want to share all my secrets here ;) For those of you who have read previous updates or noticed the thing in the current demo, than you may have a clue to what I'm talking about here.
Remember to take breaks and enjoy your family tomorrow!
-JS