Summary:
In which the Ancient Kings gain various tweaks and changes; a miscellany of work is done on the bosses and boss-level of the demo; that boss-level is, I think, now complete; work returns to the standard-enemy-level; various standard enemies are tweaked, fixed, or updated; an enemy being (intentionally) able to walk through walls is addressed; centipedes and mushrooms gain new effects; a potential-but-debated feature is tried; and some tweaks and bug-fixes are enacted.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows the entrance-hall of the boss-level in the new demo. Each portal leads to a boss, and is marked by a flame indicating the expected difficulty of that boss...
I'm curious: Which boss do you think goes with which flame...?
As a reminder, the bosses are:
- The Ancient Kings
- The Dragon
- The Shattered Noble
- The Shattered Knight
- The Thorn Guardian
In any case, the week just past was perhaps primarily a week of tweaking and polishing, although other things were done, too:
As shown above, work continued in the week just past on the boss-level of the demo.
Perhaps most saliently, I made a number of changes to the Ancient Kings:
For the last of the kings, one attack is now telegraphed a bit more, and another has a more reliable projectile. (The latter being a matter of adjusting a collision-shape: it was previously too wide, and thus would hit walls when thrown "along" them.)
For the third of the kings, the manner of one attack has been tweaked, making them a bit more dangerous. Furthermore, a minor bug-fix was implemented.
But the biggest change was in the fourth of the kings.
You see, this king telekinetically controls a pair of axes, flying them about the boss-arena. They can be quite deadly as one manoeuvres about!
But I found to my frustration that one didn't actually
have to manoeuvre: one could just park in a corner and shoot at the boss as they passed. The axes avoided the corners. :/
So, I made some changes to the behaviour of those axes--and suffice it to say that corners are no longer safe! >
Other changes to the bosses and their level were fairly minor: the flames shown in the first screenshot above (now of a single colour, varying only in size and intensity, as I recall); some health-gems being spawned after each fight; a change to the turn-rate used by the Ancient Kings upon entering; seats for the Ancient Kings; a cave at the back of the Dragon's lair; and updated geometry for the Dragon's "fire-arcs".
(Those "fire-arcs", in the end, proved both simpler and trickier to make than I'd expected.)
What's more, I think that I now have the boss-level complete for the demo!
And with that, I have turned my attention back to the level that shows standard enemies.
In the level itself, I worked on the sequence of encounters, the placement and numbers of enemies, and the shapes of the rooms themselves.
I also made a variety of changes to individual enemies:
Many of these were fairly minor changes: an adjustment to the timing of the Cave Worms; tweaks and fixes to the Avatars of Incipience (including some new--simple--animations); a change to the activation of Spore Mushrooms; and a new effect for Cave Worm venom.
More noteworthy, perhaps, is that I addressed an issue with the ghostly Shrouds: the fact that they could (being ghosts) pass through walls. This could potentially land them in another room, which might then result in their being deactivated (if the room was inactive), or have implications for any code examining the number of enemies in their room.
In the end, I did two things: I prevented them from having their "current room" changed, even when they do actually move out of it, and I had them move back towards the centre of their room when the player leaves it.
It's not a perfect solution, but it seems to work!
And last of such enemy-changes, Centipedes now apply a damage-over-time "venom" effect, while Spore Mushrooms apply a "slow" effect. These intended to reflect one of the themes of their home moon...
Turning to game-features, as I recall I have at times considered and internally debated the question of adding health-bars to standard enemies.
On the one hand, health-bars would allow players to see how tough a given enemy might be, and how much damage their various combat-spells inflict. (This might be especially helpful for tougher enemies, allowing the player to see progress in the fight.)
It would also make the health-drain effect of a certain enemy more apparent to the player, I daresay.
On the other hand... I fear that it may decrease immersion by making the experience feel more artificial, and I'm not sure that it matches the feel of this game.
Nevertheless, in the week just past I tried it.
I'm... still not convinced, and have for now disabled it... but it remains under consideration.
And finally, in the week just past I enacted various minor fixes and tweaks, which are perhaps not worth detailing here.
Although I remain amused by the (now-fixed) bug in which the player could use the "grab" "metroidvania-upgrade" to catch and drag around the underlying (invisible, non-interactive) "Boss"-object of the Ancient Kings and Shattered Knight--thus moving all of their elements at an offset!
That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
