Made several additions and improvements to the boss today. This is surely not the last time I will touch it, but it will be awhile before I circle round to the boss again. There’s much to do down the line. It’s good to tick some boxes.
Added vital physical alterations to the boss, the most notable one being a lantern. Spoiler, the boss is a Haunter too, and because of this I realized I could make his hammer out of light as well. So it looks simple and still badass. The lantern serves as a nice source of luminescence as well so it’s easy to tell where he is since his face is masked in shadow. I also cleaned up the fire he throws, making it more visible. It used a projective component that has a homing function. The speed seemed to slow so I ramped it up and the boss it definitely harder now, but I’d rather make it too difficult then make it easier rather than the other way around. Added a crazy attack too that annihilates the player if they’re not careful enough.
There was a small issue where certain attacks wouldn’t let the boss know it was at half-health. I realized I arranged my nodes wrong and just had to put the function at the end. Simple changes like these are so satisfying when they work.
I thought it would be cool to toss in some voice lines as well, that I recorded myself. Moving forward if I think they fit I may add more voice lines to the game. Since the character is returning to the world the boss will react differently from the first time they see the player and so forth, that’s if the player dies and dies again. A tiny, but cool update is that I improved the logic of the UI so that when the Pause screen is open the Boss’ life bar is hidden as well. Previously only the player’s resources would be hidden and the boss’ would still show because I kept it separate. But I found a way to add logic that worked for both the player and boss’ bars.
Last thing unrelated to the boss was an update to the sprint animation for the player. I wasn’t liking it so I changed it so a different one. That is all. Next on the agenda is probably squashing some bugs I have on my list before I amass even more. Then I wanna check out the online course for post-processing. I feel that I am at a point where I can start refining the early aesthetics of the game. That way I can really nail down how I want it to look.
GoldenGratus Games 