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[Photon]

TIIIIMMY.

I'm so glad to see this becoming a full-fledged experience. Its amazing how far this has come from the Flash version from awhile ago (oh good grief, that was awhile ago, wasn't it?!?!) Keep those updates coming because they are great! As someone trying to get bent a bit into better game dev shape, it certainly helps! Kudos!

[SunWuKong]

TIIIIMMY.

I'm so glad to see this becoming a full-fledged experience. Its amazing how far this has come from the Flash version from awhile ago (oh good grief, that was awhile ago, wasn't it?!?!) Keep those updates coming because they are great! As someone trying to get bent a bit into better game dev shape, it certainly helps! Kudos!

HA!!! Thanks so much for the comment and the reply. Glad you are liking the updates. I really enjoy putting them together and hope they help out people.

Yeah, it's been so long since the Flash version and this one is light-years past it. HAHAHA, really that is due to some of the great people I am working with. They are amazing and making a difference!

Keep checking back - more to come!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Thanks for stopping by and welcome back to the Boss 101 weekly update! A smorgasbord of goodies awaits you this week!

Weapons - the Lightning Gun

In the quest to bring you rocking gameplay and boatloads of fun we added this dandy into the player's arsenal - the lighting gun. Yeah, it is not only powerful but can target nearby enemies automagically and jump around to all local targets. When there is a lot of action on the screen is makes for a pretty sick show.

The player's version can be upgraded to allow for better targeting and more damage. It's great for clearing the area of those pesky bad guys. Check it out!

Of course the bosses will have their own version. You might want to give it a wider berth since it can do serious damage. Of course you will be able to mitigate the damage with various upgrades but in the meanwhile - steer clear buddy!

Making Boss Levels

Work continues on the final levels of the game - SUPER BOSS LEVELS! Just a peek at what is going on but we have in progress shots of the before and after art as it is being created.

The setup

Initial layout - we look to integrate new art with existing art. In this case we have a set of pillars we are already using. These caps are for decoration and variety.

The Black and White

All niced up with some fancy art. From here they get colored and prepped for use in the game.

Animations from the Boss Command Center

Looks like Max & STEVE set off alarms at robo HQ. Late night raids do that.

Making a Game - a look at the bigger picture

Occasionally we bring you a look at the How to Make a Game series we're putting together for our friends at Indie Game Riot. Here is a snippet from the latest this week.

OK, you have your basic game loop and now you want to expand beyond that. Well, what do you do after that? Good question – you lay out the entire game in rough form as soon as possible!

You see, the temptation is always to spend time on things like polishing up this or that specific system but the real thing is you are making a game. A game has a lot of parts and you most likely aren’t a huge team. Completeness is your weapon against forgetfulness and running out of time.

Specifically I am referring to the situation you will be in when you make a cool game loop and a few awesome little gameplay features. You might sit back and thing “All locked down now!” but you aren’t. not even close. You’re making good progress though so stuck with it. Start laying out all the game loops you can think of. For every system. This includes all the UI potentials, all the gameplay modes, all the little things like loading and saving.

Break large areas down into smaller ones but don’t stop at any one area. “But Tim, won’t I just be skimming through a ton of important things?” Yes, my friend and that is exactly the point. You want to get a real assessment of all the systems which are in your game. From years of experience the best way for this assessment is to just make the game. Not plan it or think about it or imagine it will all be OK later. Just make the systems and see how they work.

I do recommend you put the systems in on a first pass level. That means they are working with a UI that is not all temp art. You should always make an effort to put in good art and good code. That is also part of the exercise.

Hope you enjoyed this look and more to come.

As always - live your dreams!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Welcome back to the weekly Boss 101 update!

How do you relay information to the player clearly and at the correct time?

This week we are diving into UI with a look at the Status Icons for the game Boss 101. What are status icons you ask? Good question! Status icons are the visual indicators for effects on weapons and bosses. For instance a boss might have a flame weapon. Well, we would have a status icon for the flame weapon created so you would know in advance what you are facing.

The idea here is we want the Make A Boss room to be a dynamic thing. You roll a boss and see the effects he has and you pull up the equip panel to decide what’s best to battle him with. Maybe the boss is weak versus melee weapons? Well this is where you can choose what to take him down with

The philosophy here is we want the player to really enjoy the idea of rolling random bosses and getting a moment to plan an attack. Kinda like thinking on your feet in the middle of the battle. We designed the game around the idea you get bonuses for clearing out bosses in sets as well as the idea you use certain boss parts to create or develop more tech for your weapons. That is where the Make A Boss equip screen makes its mark. Let’s dive in!

Figure 1: Here we have the regular Make a Boss screen with a couple of red squares representing the effect icons. Notice we are just laying things in for position and to get a sense of space.

Figure 2: Here’s a layout with everything planned. You see a sample of icons and names in their proper positions. The point here is to create a UI with a focus on the important things. In this case we are giving the player a direct look at not only the Bosses abilities but allowing the player to compare this with his own weapons and armor (hats).

Figure 3: Here’s a first pass on some various effects for bosses

Figure 4: So the player will have resistances to the bosses effects (like poison for instance). This is a simple layout page with classic video game tropes using arrows to represent the good and bad effects for the player.

Figure 5: A look at some effects laid on for display on the Make A Boss Screen. This is mostly to get a sense of the colors and the best way to display things.

OK – that is the highlights for now but comments are questions are always welcome. We hope you liked this high level look at creating a game UI and the thinking that goes behind every part. We will be bring you more looks at UI philosophy and development in the coming weeks!

Boss 101 Gameplay testing

Welp, when the night winds down what better to do than play a little Boss 101 and shake down the latest. Here we are threading the needle during crazy boss attacks! If you don’t have the right hat you better be pretty good at flying! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Remember to Live Your Dreams!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Hello and welcome to the Boss 101 update of the week. We have a few things for you so let’s get cracking!

Command Center Main Room

You already know Max and STEVE have a hangout but we recently did some adjustments and touchups to the place. Mostly so you can enjoy it a little better and understand the layout. You see - this isn’t just their home it’s yours too!

First up we have the redecorated main room with a big screen TV, award and basic remodeling. The idea in this room is you have access to all things you have done in the game (like achievements, stat tracking, etc). Additionally you can hang out with the guys and play games - that’s what the arcade matching is for after all. Finally we have a couple places you can go to from here. Kite Hill - were you fly a kite with the guys and the Endless Boss mode - where you can test your skills against a neverending horde of boss baddies. So to break it down you have:

Movies - replay and re-watch movies you have seen
Kite Flying - fly a kite with the guys
Endless Boss - take on endless boss baddies
Professor Mole - consult him when you have questions about gameplay or game elements
Trophies - Stat and achievement tracking
Arcade Games - relax and play games

Check out the images below:

Main Room:

Main Room with selection labels active - same room but with the guides active to show the player some of what they can activate.

A close up of a few of the TV shows playing while you hang out.

Indie Game Battle

How awesome is this! The guys working on Indie Game Battle (http://www.indiedb.com/games/indiegamebattle) put up the latest gameplay preview with your boys Max and STEVE as playable characters! Check out the sweet footage below!

Screenie for you!

Despite his sarcasm, S.T.E.V.E. does care! He's actually a good teacher!

How to Make a Game - Preview of the next update!

When you are making a game - have you every wondered about the work that goes into it? We have so we broke it down into four basic areas:

What you know you’ve done: This is work you know about. Work you have done. This would be something like the creation and animation of the player and environment sprites. This is stuff scheduled and done.

What you know you haven’t done: This is stuff you know about, is scheduled and has not been done yet. Inserting sounds, finishing the cinematic movies, VFX might fall into this category.

What you DON’T KNOW and you HAVE DONE: This is stuff you needed to do and by sheer luck or fortune you ALREADY DID. This was not scheduled per-se but resulted from a lucky bit of earlier work. An example - you create the UI for an inventory panel a while back. When you go to make the UI for the player store you realize you already had done the base work when you did the player inventory. It was matter of re-using the designs and ideas to quickly make the new store in a fraction of the normal time.
An IMPORTANT NOTE: This type of work must be recognized for what it is when the time comes or you will redo things unnecessarily. Recognizing work you ALREADY did is the way to avoid remaking things over and over.
 
What you don’t know and you haven’t done: This is the killer category. This is every single thing that has not been done and you just didn’t think about while putting the game together. This category exists in all games no matter how much planning happens. It’s what I call the “bottom of the iceberg”. It might be big, it might be small. I’d like to think on Boss 101 we have a pretty small amount of stuff in here but there most certainly is stuff in here.
Examples: Medals awarded at the end of your game rounds. When those go in it is obvious they need a little something more than the method scoped out (perhaps they just appear with no VFX). Nothing was wrong with the idea planned but the execution gave you a clear picture of improvement. This is a case of the “you didn’t know and didn’t do it”. No one is to blame, nothing is wrong, this is just game development.
Most games live and die on this category: If you want a game that is going to get great reviews and the attention fans and friends you will do well to pay special attention to this category.

That's all for the moment but we'll be back soon with a new update!

Thank you for reading and keep living your dreams!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Welcome back to the weekly update and thank you again for stopping by. This week we are moving into the polish phase for much of Boss 101. This includes the UI and the overall gameplay.

Today’s focus is on the UI improvements we are making.

Backstory:
If you recall last week, I spoke about the types of work you have on a game, they are:

-What you know you’ve done
-What you know you haven’t done
-What you DON’T KNOW and you HAVE DONE
-What you don’t know and you haven’t done

Today’s topic is really about the third category because when it comes to polish there are likely many things you have already done that you don’t know about. This was not scheduled per-se but resulted from a lucky bit of earlier work. An example - you create the UI for an inventory panel a while back. When you go to make the UI for the player store you realize you already had done the base work when you did the player inventory. It was matter of re-using the designs and ideas to quickly make the new store in a fraction of the normal time.

This type of work must be recognized for what it is when the time comes or you will redo things unnecessarily. Recognizing work you ALREADY did is the way to avoid remaking things over and over.

We have two things on the list. The Boss 101 start screen and the hat store. Both of these had a very good first pass in the game. They were functional and you could do all the needed things with them. The problem was they were some of the first things done in the game. What that meant was they were the product of the oldest thinking and design styles. This isn’t a bad thing but we had some new things in that were pretty spiffy so when it came time to polish we had an opportunity to drop in some of the new stuff instead of trying to make the old art work.

The reasoning here is the old art was just not part of the same process and thinking as the latest (and near final) game. So here’s what we did!

Start Screen:

The old start screen with the first pass load game menu. Nothing exactly wrong with this, it functions but it is kinda lifeless and blocks the main menu. No bueno!

So we made some adjustments and added in the Gopher scientists you work with in the game. Notice the new animations and the way it shows off the main logo. MUCH BETTER!

Hat Store:

One of the oldest UI screens in the game. Developed early with a lot of high hopes. Thing is. It is not really thematically linked to any of the new Command Center art. Mister Gopher to the rescue again! The thinking here is you have a large command center and it’s story is part of the game. Why things look a certain way is writing into the main story. The old hat store didn’t fit that mythos but the new one does in a way the player will be a part of. Here’s a place where we have done some work and unified many things under one umbrella of logic. We simply added the hat store to that list

Old Hat Store

New Hat Store prep work

New Hat Store

Minion Styled Hats

You can wear minion hats and maybe make some friends! 

Ok - folks - that is it for this week but check back again.

As always - LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Hello and welcome to another Boss 101 update! Thank you for stopping by.

This week we are in the SOUP with tuning. If you have been following along you know we are getting near the end of the tunnel and we can see the light of completion. A lot of what we are doing from here on out is tuning the user experience.

Tuning can help prevent things from getting too... ahem... CRAZY!



That means we aren’t just looking for bugs of UI tweaks. We are looking at the whole game from top to bottom and making sure the minute to minute gameplay is fun and engaging. Some of that is done through constant gameplay and some is done by gut feeling. A lot of it though starts with laying in a foundation based of the game progression you want to have. In our case we are telling our story with an arcade like wrapper. To that end we are looking to have a fun shooter experience and give the player things they will want to come back to like upgrades, new weapons, new abilities and many new challenges in each level.

When the web version of Boss 101 was made many Excel charts were generated about various mechanics and tunes. These weren’t the set in stone final things we used but they were the guides for all the things happening in the game. We wanted to share some of these ideas with you here so you can have an idea how it’s all coming together.

We want to stress these are from the OLD version of boss 101 but you will see from the examples and some imaginative thinking exactly how much effort might go into something as simple as an arcade shooter progression chart. Do you need to be this elaborate? Maybe not. Some people are naturals at various things in game making and maybe yours in tuning and balance.

Let’s get rolling shall we?

Boss Health Calculations: When we got rolling on what you would be fighting we realized it would be helpful to lay out exactly how many hit points the various “Make-A-Bosses” might have across the levels. It was pretty useful for us to create this handy chart of the level, the boss and the various pieces that might occur and then calculate the high and low hit point values. Made tuning guns a lot easier when you knew how tough the boss was!



Gun Values Across levels: Once we knew the boss health we did the same with the guns. We took all the guns, all the possible upgrades and made a min/max chart of the ways the player could have upgraded the various weapons. There were less weapons in the web game but you can see the chart was still extensive (and this is only a fraction of it)



Boss Weapons: Like the player weapons - we looked at the boss weapons and how they were used and buffed up throughout the game. Things like the firing percentage, movement triggers and various other pertinent data were captured in a large sheet for us to review.



Asset Use: Also help was a breakdown of the levels and how we were using the art assets. Pretty valuable to avoid time and effort wasting when you start seeing how often or how little some art is being used. I do recommend this kind of a chart for any game since you will often make a lot of good finds.



Hat Decoder: Many of the upgrades in the game came from the wearing of various hats to make your character look cooler ANY give him some robo-stomping powers. A list of the powers, the scaling and the various abilities granted was essential!



Boss 101 Fan Art by Ban Beaulieu

An old pal came through with some incredible art for Boss 101. Talk about an inspiring piece! Max and STEVE jetpacking with a boot gun!



Check out Dan on his Instagram account: here https://instagram.com/dbeaulieu77/

That's all for this week folks and come back next for a look at the progress!

Remember to live your dreams!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Hello and welcome back to the Boss 101 weekly update!

Hats and Bullets!

This week we are talking about one of my to-date favorite touches we put in the game. Yep, you know it’s gotta be hats, but WAIT, there’s more! So you know we have the ability to dress up your character with cool little hats which grant you benefits. Thing like more money, health or other SECRET things I can’t talk about here. Needless to say they are cool and can help you through the various bosses in the game.

One thing we decided to do was not only add in the ability for the hat to change your outward look but it also will affect the look of the bullets on the player’s main machine gun. The whole point of the system is to give you the player more bang for the buck when you buy a hat in the game. We want  you to get as much possible from you purchase and really feel like it was money well spent. We know a lot of times we fall in love with accessories in games and will wear them long after they have served their main purpose simply because they are cool to look at. Well, this is our way you make sure these hats are as cool to you (and us) as possible.

It’s all part of our plan to give you the best Boss 101 experience we can give you. We want to tell an awesome story so YOU have awesome stories to tell when you’re done playing!

Check it out.

Here we have NUTZ, one of the hats you can buy in the Hat Store. See that acorn thing? Well that is our current pass on the way this hat will alter your machine gun bullet.

Let’s see one of the first tests of this system in action shall we? Check him out just firing away here:

And then him against a Boss:

I think you can see this is a pretty dope system with a LOT of cool upside. I mean, can you imagine what all THESE hats might change your bullets into?

We will keep you posted on the system as it goes in and drop in some more previews as we shake things down some more.

Boss Health Bars

It’s not all bosses and hats with the game. Sometimes you gotta dig into the little things to make sure everything gets polish. Check out the snazzed up boss health bars. These are just 4 of the 6 possible boss bars. The early ones worked but the new ones give a much better impression of progression and differentiation. Heck, they just look cooler too!

We hope you like this little look at the way things are shaping up. Check back next week for the latest news!

Remember to always LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Creating Achievements and Quests for the player

While working on Boss 101 we’re always looking for things to add which increase the playability of the game for the player. Things like mini-games, quests and achievements are a few of the tried and true ways we keep you in the experience and tell more story.

You already know about hats in the game. These are the basic player buffs you buy which increase various aspects of the main character (firepower, immunities, money gained, etc). One of the things we thought might be neat was to hide hats across the game levels. The FIRST idea we had was to make these hidden hats tied to some level of damage or characters defeated. That would mean the achievement could come up any time you met the requirements and probably during a moment you were not expecting. That’s cool and all but for us it took away some of the fun behind the achievement.

We ended up modifying the idea to require the player to be actively looking for these secrets. Kinda like a miner searching for gold. With this in mind we created what we call ‘achievement hats’. These are things you buy then USE to actively search for the hidden hats in the levels.

A few things come from this. One is we make the whole thing a much more active process. The people finding these secrets are LOOKING for these secrets. We can also tailor the rewards accordingly knowing people went out and worked for it a bit harder than those who might have gotten it otherwise.

Now, of course this is all debatable and the way achievements are set up in any game is open to interpretation. We do think for us on Boss 101 we have a nice system here which allows players to not only play a great game with a fun story but also spend a little more time using the skills and weapons they mastered doing fun side jobs.

Some images:

First – the achievement searching hat itself bought in the player store:

Second – Here’s the hat with its phases of animation:

Third – the player wearing the hat during a round and searching for a secret:

Fourth – When you win the achievement it shows up at the end of the round win screen:

Fifth – The achievement is then transferred to the player map screen where he can see how far along he is for round completion:

Hope you enjoyed that little look at the way we are setting up but one of the many things you will be doing in Boss 101.

Tune in next week and remember to LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

[nnyei]

Oh man, I'm so hyped for this. I'm big into monster/boss design and I've only just realized how badly I want to play a game like this. I'll have to go back and read through the whole thread once I have more time, but man, am I looking forward to this.

[SunWuKong]

Oh man, I'm so hyped for this. I'm big into monster/boss design and I've only just realized how badly I want to play a game like this. I'll have to go back and read through the whole thread once I have more time, but man, am I looking forward to this.

Hey man thank you for that nice comment! So glad to hear you are excited 'cause we sure are! HAHAHA

Yeah, check out the thread. It's indexed on the front page for easy access. We put up new stuff every week and work to make it as informative as possible for you and any other devs reading it!

-Tim

[Photon]

SO MUCH INFORMATION...   

Maybe one of these days I'll actually give things a thorough read through. Even if I just skim, it still makes me think about how my workflow should be, and I appreciate that! KEEEEEP GOOOOING.

[SunWuKong]

SO MUCH INFORMATION...   

Maybe one of these days I'll actually give things a thorough read through. Even if I just skim, it still makes me think about how my workflow should be, and I appreciate that! KEEEEEP GOOOOING.

HAAAAAAAAAA!! Yeah, we've been keeping it going for a while. Thanks for checking out the post. Love to hear your thoughts if you dive into some of the posts.

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Cinematics and Boss 101!

You asked and now you will know! How do we do that magical cinematic storytelling? Let’s see shall we!

For setup - We use a combination of Esoteric’s Spine software for animation and GameMaker Studio. Obviously you could do all we do without Spine but for us it's a huge timesaver for setup and quick iteration. 

First – well, to be frank, we plot out the script. Any old word processing program or whatever you like works at this stage. Just layout the idea and the plan out the art assets you will need. From there we move into Photoshop for basic pixel artwork. We also reuse sprite and assets from the game (huge timesaver). We can call in any asset previously made and have it run any animation we like. For the most part we are running talk idles and general motion idles during cinemas. Background objects have their own idles for things like blinking light panels or machinery.

Second – we bring it all into Spine for basic layout. Here’s the magic of our system in place. We can position all the assets and place all the bones for things like dialog balloons (both the tails the main balloon can be positioned in Spine). The reason for this is to allow a nice level of precision. During gameplay the balloons are dynamically placed and that’s fine for high action but here we want composition and control.

This image shows the setup in Spine of the various assets

Third – We take the rough script and convert it into ‘cinema-code’ in Excel. This is just an easy-peasy way to get the code all straightened out and cleaned up. It’s WAY easier to enter and edit in here than most text editors especially if you are dealing with code snippets as part of the input.

Fourth – The code is simply cut and paste from Excel and BAM! Cinematic script is all done!

Fifth – then we test things out. The assets are called out from a script and loaded up. Here’s a snip from some game dialogs.

Asset loading

The above script tested

Some later dialog during this cinema.

Bringing it all together.

Kite Hill time! It all comes together when we get to watch our characters in action. Sometimes simple questions are the most profound…

Hope you enjoyed this look and come back next week for more! Remember to live your dreams!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Welcome back to another Boss 101 weekly update!

This week we are looking at more of the UI development. Specifically the construction of one of the more fun pages – Professor Gopher’s Wiki!

So – we have a knowledge codex for the player and in keeping with the theme of the game we are making it based in the Gopher Tech. These are the guys who helped put together your command center so it’s fitting they help you retrieve new and useful information about the things you find and do in the game. The Wiki is part instruction manual and part story telling device.  Information is added as you go along and discover new facts.

We started with a basic idea. A page where the player can see information in an easy to read format and have something thematically inline with the game. This, as you might imagine, could be a huge rabbit hole of thinking. Thankfully we had quite a few guidelines already in place in terms of gopher and command center tech. Mostly it was about finding pieces which worked and fitting them in.

Step 1: we took what we have already in place and laid out an overall page where the info will go. The first thing we are looking to do is get art pass in so we know the sizes of the information. Things like layout and font sizes are a big deal when you are showing the player information. In this case we wanted as much space as we could afford.

Step 2: Art first pass. At this stage we have a nice idea of how the page might look in terms of the general art. We also have the beginnings of a theme. There is a USB stick and a gopher touch pad going in so the next phase will be to push it further.

Step 3: We look at prior screens which have a similar look. In this case the movie replay room. From here a bunch of notes are made. The idea is the gophers are cannibalizing the tech from various parts of the command center and piecing things together as they see fit. Nothing should look completely whole or perfect and for the most part we want the place to have the vibe of a hand built machine.

Step 4: Ok, now it’s coming together nicely. We can see the theme really taking shape and the look is getting firmly established. Still more tweaks to do but this is the final stretch.

Step 5: Here we see the art and tech in a true first pass. The tech is hooked up so if you move up and down you see a short temp loading animation and when you stop it will show you the page you stopped on. The pages and names are temp of course but they do show the underlying tech is there and the art is in place. Now to fill up the Wiki with info!

Like that one?! We hope so and much more to come!

Screenshot time – Dinosaurs anyone?

Like Jurassic World? RoboDinosaurs? We got you covered.  

Indie Game Riot Panel this Friday - July 17th, starting at 8pm EST

Hey all this is Tim. I will be giving a 45 minute panel on How to Make Your Games and Your Dreams Come True this Friday, July 17th at 8pm-8:45pm EST. Join me and check out the other great talks. It's all being broadcast so check it out!

Indie Revolution Expo

Check back soon and remember to live your dreams!

-Tim

[clewcat]

Most sophisticated (and cute!) shmup I've ever seen. Keep it up!

[SunWuKong]

Most sophisticated (and cute!) shmup I've ever seen. Keep it up!

HA! Thanks so much and glad you enjoyed what you saw. There's always more coming and keep checking in. We keep the updates coming regularly!

Best,

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Welcome back to the weekly Boss 101 update!

This week we have a couple things to talk about. Both of them are about the polish tweaks going into Boss 101 to make it nicer looking, raise the quality bar and improve the user experience.

Boss Bar Shields and Warp Engines

Our bosses have  a bunch of abilities and the challenge is to give you clear visibility of events so you can make the best decisions. For instance, we have bosses which put up shields and bosses that can enter warp tunnels. Let’s talk about the Warp Tunnels…

Warp Tunnels happen when a boss gets damaged enough to run away from the current fight. Of course, you don’t want him to get away so you follow him and knock him out of warp. What does all this mean you ask? Good question! Well, you need to knock down his warp field which is represented by a new overlay on his health bar. NOW WE GET TO THE UI TOUCHES!

The warp bar color change is nice but we felt is wasn’t enough. We wanted something a little extra to happen and that is the warp icon. This is our way of showing the player clearly that he is dealing with a boss that will jump to warp when enough damage is taken. This gives the player a clear sense of what’s coming. Let’s see some of the development shall we?

Setup in Spine of the boss shield and warp icons.



First pass of warp icon and the boss shield icon.



Warp Icon in round BEFORE a warp tunnel (to inform the player)



Warp Icon in a warp tunnel in action



Professor Gopher Wiki

Small polish item but here is a new touch added to Professor Gopher’s Wiki machine. While you are scrolling and looking for a new page to read you will see this loading animation. Hey, it’s a small thing but it’s done well and when you do ENOUGH small awesome things you end up with a BIG AWESOME THING! YES! HAHAHAHAHAH HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Art callout for Wiki Animation



Loading Animation



Thanks for checking in and hope you enjoyed the look. Remember to come back next week and in the meanwhile…

LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Welcome back to this week’s AWESOME Boss 101 Update!

Today we are talking about character dress up – specifically HATS! YEAH BUDDY! Who doesn’t want cool lids to go into battle with? Valve sure thinks you want them in Team Fortress 2 and we are giving them to you in Boss 101.

For a long time we had hats in the game as buffs to your powers. Extra health, extra firepower, etc. Some hats were especially good against certain types of bosses and others gave you money bonuses depending on what you were attacking. All good things. What was missing though was that last little touch to make the hat special.

Well, along came an idea while we were working on another system to add various abilities for hats, ammunition and bosses. We call it the “alt” system and what it does is allow is to specify replacing one thing for another. We can also use the alt system to allow things a bullet to doing more or less damage on certain types of bosses. The best part is we can use the system to replace one sprite for another.

It wasn’t a far stretch from there to make the leap of replacing the player’s machine gun bullets with special bullets related to the hat you are wearing. This was an easy change requiring some additional art but we believe it’s WELL worth it. To date we have over 200 hats in the game and NEARLY EVERY SINGLE ONE has its own custom bullet to add that much more flavor. Check it out.

Here you have the Hat Store with all the lids you will need!



And now the Zombie hat in battle – TOSSING BRAINS!



And a guitar hat – BLASTING NOTES!



And Major Mayhem – THROWING SHIELDS!



Indie Game Riots – Indie Revolution 2015

First off a HUGE, huge thanks to Josh and the guys at Indie Games Riot for having us at the IRX15. It was awesome giving a talk last Friday and then hanging around with other devs throughout the weekend. Learned a terrific amount from all the talks and just chatting.

Second – we’re so happy to announce Boss 101 won the Most Revolutionary Game this year. It really came as a surprise and it is very humbling to have Boss 101 acknowledge in such a great light. Thank you to everyone who has been checking in on us and rooting for us. It means everything.

Please remember to always live your dreams as they do come true. BELIEVE IT!

-Tim

[SunWuKong]

Hello and welcome back to the latest in Boss 101 news.

This week we are talking about your friends from the Boss 101 Command Center. The Gopher Science Team! That is correct, you have your own science team to help you develop new weapons and ideas in your fight against the bosses.

The idea is we want to give the player (you) a better sense of the activities and work that are going on to support you and your efforts. You didn’t just stumble into this awesome Command Center. You built it along with your friends! You added all the cool tech and you are using that tech to create new ideas to help bring you out ahead. Of course, sometimes the tech gets a little ahead of you and guys like STEVE, ROB and the Professor help reel it back in.

Let’s meet the team shall we?



Professor – arguably the leader of the group and head of the team. He helps develop the main technology in the Command Center and is responsible for taking your Boss 101 winnings and turning it into new weapons.

Roger – the professor’s right hand gopher. He’s helping with all the lab preparations and organization.

Agent 5 – when you need secret parts for the new gun or hat. Agent 5 will get it for you.

Cosmo – She works with professor to implement the new gun technology.

Jay Henry – the hardest working Gopher in the show biz or gopher biz. He is in charge of all the construction projects in the Command center.

Here’s a quick meet the cast to show you a bit of who’s who in action!



Also – we have ROB who works with the science team to develop new tech for you. He’s another jetpack like STEVE but it’s safe to say he’s not quite as sarcastic though. ROB brings you news and updates and tends to spend a lot of time in the basement working on his secret project which he one day may share with the team.



Stealing the Sun

So one thing Boss 101 is up to is confiscating local suns for his own nefarious purposes. Here we have the guys fighting as Boss 101 and his team look to round up another star. Don’t let ‘em take ole Sol! It’s pretty important to everyone on Earth wouldn’t you say?





Thanks for stopping by and much more to come next week with news about the cinematics and the latest in gameplay and tunes!

See you then and live your dreams!

-Tim