Resonant Blade Devlog + Update #23

INTRO

Hey, everyone! Resonant Blade is my solo indie game that's been in development for 2+ years. Lots of progress and learning, but still a long ways to go. Resonant Blade is a 2d sci-fi action-adventure game inspired by games like Hyper Light Drifter and classic Zelda games. Although I've been posting more regularly on GameJolt, Twitter, and Youtube, I figured I might as well share the game here, too!

Resonant Blade Demo

INDIE GAME DEVLOG EPISODE 23: THE COLOSSUS!

Welcome to Episode 23 of the Resonant Blade Devlog series! In this episode, I’ll be showing you all the new boss I’ve been working on, The Colossus.

BOSS ROOM AND DESIGN

You’ll run into this boss in the first dungeon, the Underwater Research Lab in Locria City. I took the design from the giant submerged robot from the Locria City scene and used that as a template for this boss adding in some hands and side turrets that descend from the ceiling. The design of the Boss Room reuses some elements from the underwater tunnel I showed in a previous devlog. It’s still kind of bare and there are some more details to add with the water layers and ceiling. At one point, I was trying to add more space for the player to move around on in the room, but this just didn’t fit in with the Colossus’s design and started to make things unnecessarily complicated.

I tried to sketch out and design as much of the Colossus’s mechanics before actually implementing any of them. This helped me stay on track and kept things in a manageable state. I also started using a new built-in method for timing events that I wish I had been using since I started working on Resonant Blade. When I was first looking into Unity Coding tutorials, I think the first few I studied used timers that occur in the Update method. Since that seemed to work, I’ve been using those ever since. However, the IEnumerator method makes some things much easier and quicker to implement and test and there ends up being way less timer variables to keep track of.

PULSE CANNON AND HAND LASERS

The Colossus has two main attacks, the Pulse Cannon and the Hand Lasers. For the Pulse Cannon, the Colossus opens up its mouth revealing the cannon and fires multiple shots in a wide arc towards the player. This attack was somewhat easy to implement. Create art assets, instantiate prefabs, update the position at different velocities, and make them hurt the player.

The Hand Lasers were much tougher to design because I had to figure out how to use the Line Renderer component in Unity. After sorting that out, it was just a matter of updating the end point position of the line and adding some sprites and collision at the contact point. There’s also a third attack that I made when I added those side platforms to the room, but that one didn’t make it into the final design.

THREE STAGES

The Colossus has three stages that ramp up the difficulty at each new stage. The first stage eases the player into the fight. The Colossus will cycle through its Pulse Cannon and Hand Laser attacks before randomizing the resonant frequencies of its hands. Throughout this boss fight, the player will have to stun the Colossus by taking out its two hands or throwing a sonic grenade in its mouth.

After one of these two conditions are met, the hands will activate a powerup in the center of the room.The player will be granted a temporary Resonant frequency that they can use to damage the Colossus’s head. I’m planning on reusing the resonant frequency powerup throughout the dungeon leading up the boss. I think this will help tie the dungeon and boss together and should help clue in the player to what they’ll need to be doing in the boss fight. After doing enough damage to the head, the Colossus will move on to the second stage.

Things start moving faster in the next two stages with a more annoying Pulse Cannon combined with two side turrets that come down from the ceiling. Also, in the second and third stages I added some cracks in the Colossus’s armor and some smoke and shock effects to show the boss becoming more and more damaged. In the final stage, the Colossus closes its hands to hide its Resonant Frequency from being seen. I still need to add this in, but the player will still be able to hear the Resonant Frequency to find out the hands’ weaknesses in this stage. I was also thinking about making the boss shut its mouth when the player throws a grenade at it. This would force the player to have to take out the hands instead.

I added in a short death cutscene after you deliver the final blow to the Colossus. I could make this death animation fancier with some shader effects, but I think it’s good enough for now. Afterwards, the new Resonant Crystal floats down and Atlas absorbs it into the Resonant Blade.

ENDING

Alright, that’s it for this episode. There’s so many ways to make this boss way more difficult, but I wanted to try and keep things as simple and straightforward as possible. After creating the Colossus, I now have a much greater sense of respect and appreciation for other video game bosses. Thanks for watching/reading everyone and I’ll see you next time!

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