Strings

To make the fight feel more varied I limited the attacks for the boss until they are at half health. Then I added the time shadow montages as I do with every boss to guarantee that the mechanic works for this boss as well. It probably won’t be too useful on this boss since he doesn’t have a weapon like other enemies. But it does look cool to see its shadow move around with it.

It still sounded a bit too quiet when the boss attacked so I added a sound for each time it summons something. This also warns the player of more incoming danger. It is important to have objects the player can throw at the boss so I added some pots near the boss’ area.

The fight felt incomplete without proper boss music. I jumped onto audacity where I removed some of the tracks and exported a new song for the fight. It severely changed the mood of the scene, and it makes it more fun to play. The boss is menacing and the song helps lead some action. I fade it in normally like any other song. I still have yet to commission a song for the exploration portions.

I’ve been debating for a while on how to change or improve the jump. During this fight, it is very clear that the jumping was a bit too sticky. In other words, the character wouldn’t always jump when the player wanted them to. This was due to a lot of factors I had set up to stop the player from jumping during certain actions. It made it difficult to dodge attacks that needed to be jumped over. To remedy this I removed any checks that kept the player from jumping and I added a montage to overwrite anything playing. The montage guarantees it will interrupt anything the character is doing. My issue with jumping before was that the player could jump in the middle of an attack and the attack would keep playing. By adding a jump montage the attack would be canceled.

For the boss’ puzzle, I added a different effect for when the player did something correctly. Tested the fight a few more times and it is difficult as it should be. Then I went into Blender to give the boss more interesting features. Added long strings or pieces of cloth that help add more life to the boss. When in motion these strings look quite epic. I had trouble adding cloth paint on them but after some poking and prodding, I got it working. I slapped on a glowing material on it and I’m happy with how it turned out.