I couldn’t stop thinking about using the whip when locked onto the enemy. It wasn’t fun having to adjust the crosshair just to hit the boss. Instead I used the awesome target system to switch back and forth between two different aim modes for the whip. Now when locked on the whip automatically hits the target but only from a certain distance. To balance it out I made the range of the whip shorter compared to when you aren’t aiming. The crosshair is a bit too small and I will remedy that shortly. The blueprint for the whip has become kind of a mess, but it’s organized chaos. The flow is much better now that I understand how to communicate with the animations.
After getting the lock on system in working order I dressed up the boss arena a bit more, put movable props that do tend to get buggy when the boss interacts with it, but I think it’s worth the risk because it looks really cool when he runs or hits them. I put torches and some points the player can swing from. It was difficult to tell when the player was making contact with the whip so I added a small effect on hit. Later on when I do the sound design everything will surely come together nicely. It’s a bit empty without sound but that’s another rabbit hole I’m saving for another week, maybe next week actually. I did a lot of fine tuning on the boss’ aggression, speed, life, damage to the player, etc. It’s an exciting fight that even I don’t always win. I’ll probably tune down the difficulty eventually since it is just the first boss, but I am happy with where the AI currently is.
Another small but I believe impactful change, is that I removed the crosshair from being drawn onto the screen unless the player is in “combat.” This means that if the player has used the whip the crosshair will appear, and it will only disappear if the whip hasn’t been used for about 30 seconds. It did bother me for a lot of my screenshots that the crosshair ruined the aesthetic, now I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
GoldenGratus Games 