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[sodap]

this game looks awesome except for the non-existent backgrounds. What are your plans concerning level/background art? characters and animations look amazing so far.

[Canotico]

this game looks awesome except for the non-existent backgrounds. What are your plans concerning level/background art? characters and animations look amazing so far.

Hey! Thanks! The thing is that it takes me a lot longer to get the art done, and right now I'm focusing on making sure the gameplay is what I have in mind. I've been dealing with the art as I go, thats why it's so lacking right now. But fear not! When the time comes there will be plenty of backgrounds, decorations and other important environmental stuff :D

[Canotico]

Ok lets talk about the first phase of the encounter with The Eye.

As soon as the fight starts, it is made pretty obvious that The Eye is too high for players to even try to hurt it. This leaves the players waiting to be attacked since they can't possibly do anything else.

The Eye uses one fist to attack each player, and does so by dropping the fist on the player trying to crush it. The attack is pretty slow and easy to dodge, so it's not supossed to be too stressful for the players. And because at this point the fight isn't specially hard, players are then given enough time to look around for possible things that might help them hurt the boss.



Then the buttons come into play, either by accident or by leading the fists, the players will eventually realize that if a fist drops on top of a button it will press it. Now, this doesn't necesarily tell the player what the buttons do, in fact, they are not expected to know what they do until they are activated. What's important about the buttons is that players try to press them both, meaning that they will have to coordinate their movements to achieve this. This is the first cooperative interaction in the boss fight.

As soon as both buttons are pressed, The Eye will drop down to the floor, and will lower its shield, allowing players to hurt it for a brief period of time. This sequence is to be repeated a couple of times, until the players deal enough damage to the boss so that it enters the next phase of the fight.

Which... I will talk about later :D

[Canotico]

I've been working on making sure the beam mechanic works and looks great. I changed the way I was detecting the collision of the beam from Physics2D.BoxCast to Physics2D.RayCast, why? because BoxCast just never works for me, there's always something wrong with it and I hate it, I prefer the more traditional raycasting aproach

While improving the beam itself, I've implemented a new skill for The Eye that it will use during its second phase.



It still looks too rough, and I have to deal with both ends of the beam so that they look more... beamy, but that will come later since I am focused entirely on implementing the whole fight before prettyfying anything. Its gotta be awesome first!

[Canotico]

When the players have dealt enough damage to The Eye, it will do a fist swipe that will destroy the buttons, making it impossible for the players to use the same strategy they have been using to deal damage to it. This marks the start of the second phase of the fight.



Although the rest of the fight is properly defined, I'm still trying to figure out how to make the transition to the last phase fun enough.

[Shackhal]

It's nice to see some progress in this game.

Also, that attack from the second phase can be evaded, right?

[Canotico]

It's nice to see some progress in this game.

Also, that attack from the second phase can be evaded, right?

Yes! All the characters will have some means to evade it. Also it doesn't go through the fists so perhaps the players can find shelter that way too.

[Canotico]

SECOND PHASE

After the fist swipes the ground and destroys the buttons, the players are left with no options to hurt the boss. So they have to resort to other methods to reach it.

So the objective in this phase is... not very clear... at all... Like, now the players can't hurt the boss, and... what do they have to do? Well, for starters the players will know by this point that they have to break the weak link on the left chain, but... since I haven't actually done anything to let them know visually... I'll have tell you directly. So there you go, players have to destroy the weak link on the left chain. Why? You know why. Right?

Knowing about the objective of this phase is important because we can now try get to the weak link to try and do something with it. But, there are a couple of obstacles which give flavor to this phase of the fight. And these are the fists.



The fists are there to annoy you to death. They don't want you to wall jump, and they don't want you to lower their bridges (yes the things on the top are... like bridges or something. PLACEHOLDER). And so the first objective for the players here is to get rid of those fists.

The way the attacks of The Eye work is that it will use the available fists to perform its desired attack. If for instance The Eye wanted to do this cool attack, it would use 4 fists for it, or as many as are available.



"That's cool and all but, how does that help me get rid of the fists?" Well you can damage the fists, so the idea is that as soon as a fist is at ground level, you should try and take that chance to destroy it. "But the fists I want to destroy are specific ones!" Yes, and The Eye knows this, so it actually has a priority for which fists it will use to attack the players. Because the ones it uses to block your way are the most important ones, it will not try to crush you with those unless there are no more fists available.

So, you managed to destroy the fists, but you actually have  to hurry, because if enough time passes, The Eye will do a very strong attack that actually spawns back all the destroyed fists:



This attack has a loooooooooooooong cooldown, and its there to put pressure on the players. They have to destroy the fists, and then some have to lower the bridges while others use them to cross and reach the weak link and destroy it. They must do all of this before that attack happens again.

Something worth noting about this attack is that it uses the fists to do a countdown on the time before The Eye fires the beam. This is because this attack is strongly related to the final moments this boss fight will have, and I wanted to teach the players a bit about it before they get to that point.

So, once the players managed to reach the chain link, they have to destroy it. Doing so, will start the next and last phase of the fight.



I personally love this sequence, there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in this brief period of time. Players have managed to bring down this gigantic thing so they can kick its ass. And I think it looks pretty cool.

[Canotico]

The next part of the fight is the last one. It will be the moment where the fight is at its peak, the boss is cornered and vulnerable, and players are really close to defeating it.

I still have to think of a couple of things before I can finish implementing this phase. I know how will the fight end, but there must be a sequence of events that lead up to that point that I still haven't figured out.

My initial idea is that The Eye will use 2 fists as a wall to protect itself from the players. The fists will have such a fast respawn rate that destroying them won't be a viable strategy. And then the other 4 fists will be trying to crush the players as usual. After some time has passed, the boss will remove the fists in front of it (in the same way they fade to the background as a countdown to the beam) and then fire a beam horizontally at the players.

I still don't like that sequence 100%, so I'm gonna try to think of ways of improving it and making it more exciting 

[Canotico]

Ok I'm starting to have a clearer idea of the third phase. This is still a work in progress tho, so maybe tomorrow I'll decide that this is not a good idea, but the me writing this right now thinks it's a good start. So, here it goes.

One of the things that will happen as soon as The Eye falls to the ground is that it will be immediatly vulnerable to the attacks of the players. The shield that was protecting it is broken, and it no longer has the advantage of being too high up for players to reach it. This time it is trully vulnerable.

But it would be kinda lame if the rest of the fight just consisted of attacking it repeatedly until it died. So I decided that The Eye will use 2 of its fists as cover. It will create a wall in fron ot it that will make it impossible for players to hurt it.



The Eye will use 2 of its fists to defend itself against the players, these fists will have increased resistance making them practically indestructible. In the meantime The Eye will use its other fists to keep attacking the players like it always has.

The players won't be able to hurt the eye, and the fists will become stronger, perhaps will have more HP or perhaps they will respawn faster, I don't know yet. But the thing is that during this time the players will have to evade a lot and will generally be on their toes. It's supossed to be a very tense situation. Mostly because players are not able to come up with a way to hurt The Eye.

That is, until The Eye attacks. The only way to finally kill The Eye will be when it attacks the players with its ultimate attack. Why? Because it will have to withdraw its fists in order to attack, meaning that during a brief period of time, it will be vulnerable.

[BeautifulGlitch]

I'm not super fond of the art; but I really like the concept! (:

[Canotico]

I'm not super fond of the art; but I really like the concept! (:

Thanks! :D Glad you like it! It's gonna be really fun when it's finished.

[Canotico]

I did a small playtest session with my roommates yesterday and it was actually pretty good. They seemed to be having fun despite: going through walls, unbalanced timers, unfinished boss, etc. It made me realize how far the encounter is from done. There are many design issues that have to be addressed by iterating a lot.

However, the bright side is that they actually had fun! Which makes me insanely happy. There are many things missing from the game, yet they could cooperate at least a bit towards a common objective, and it was pretty fun. I'm really happy about the fact that even tho the game's so rough and the fight is so in its early stages, it can give you an idea of what is the game about, cooperation.

That said, seems to me like the game is headed in the right direction. THERE IS A LOT OF THINGS TO DO, but its getting there slowly but surely.

[Canotico]

I've spent the last days working on fixing any bug that I could find so that I can have a decently stable build to test the fight better with more than one player.

I havent't finished the design of the last phase because I'm still kinda stuck, I can't decide on a good sequence of events to take place there, but I did manage to make a decision that's going to help me figure it out.

I decided that the beam is an ability that is unique to the Thunder Swordsman. This is because the beam wasn't really fitting as a "general mechanic" for all player characters to have, because for instance, it didn't make any sense for the shieldmaiden to have an ability that did so much damage when she isn't supposed to have something like that in the first place.

So, what I decided then, is that all player character's basic attack has a "charge" component to it, where they do a different skill, but this isn't restricted to be a beam.

Now, my original idea with The Eye was that it would be really rad if the fight ended with a spectacular beam fight between the players and the boss. Well, since now the only character with such an ability is the ThunderSwordsman it seems rather stupid to head that way right? So, instead of aiming to finish the fight like that, I will provide different ways of dealing damage to it until it dies. You know, like most bosses.

I've been making a lot of design decisions that I will be explaining throughly in the coming days, and I will talk about them as soon as I have enough visual support because that's always cool to have :D

[Canotico]

So, having said that the Thunder Swordsman was the only one to have that magic beam thing, the Shieldmaiden felt kinda left out. I mean she had gotten this really cool skill and I took it away from her . But fear not! In fact I just finished animating her new charged skill to compensate for that!

It's a pretty simple skill, after charging the Shieldmaiden dashes forward basically trampling anything in her way. I wanted the skill to look pretty powerful and I think I got pretty close to that:

This was the first iteration:

Pretty simple, she dashed forward and this shield thing appears in front of her.

The second iteration:

This one had a better design for the shield that didn't occlude her body. Meaning that you could still see her while she is using it which is important. I also added more detail and an animation for the shield.

The third iteration:

Having finished the shield itself, I decided to work on the actual effects of the skill so that it looked awesome enough. I added animated dust and rings anime style (which I love btw) and added some blurred lines to the Shieldmaidens body to visually denote that she is moving really fast (because... she is).

Now the only thing missing for the shield maiden is to properly animate the Shield Wall skill (and honestly redesign it because it plainly sucks right now). Once this is done, I will explain what is the new design for the player characters skills, and how it fits in the game.

[Pixel Noise]

I really like what you're doing with the complexity in the boss fights, and the multiple stages.

[Canotico]

I really like what you're doing with the complexity in the boss fights, and the multiple stages.

Thanks! I'm putting a lot of effort in the fight so that it's exciting enough, still a long way to go but it will get there eventually 

[Canotico]

Now that the holidays break is over I can show you a bit of what's been going on. I've been working really hard on the art and I've managed to improve the FireFaculty atlas a lot. Here's a little progression thingy for your enjoyment:



And this is the current state of these assets:



right now I'm working on improving the background, and decorating the level as I add new stuff to the atlas. I must say I'm liking the results and everytime the placeholder sprites seem more out of place because everything else is being turned into final sprites. Which is you know, nice.

I'm going back and forth between art and improving the gameplay loop, and since the gameplay loop progress is not as easy to show as art, I may take a bit longer between updates because of it. But that's fine, I want to only show you cool stuff anyway :D

[Canotico]

After evading it for a long time, i've finally finished implementing the Shieldmaiden's Shield Wall skill. It was always very... um... lets say poorly made...

Anyway! She now rolls and then creates a wall where she was before!



I've also been finishing some details on the 2 characters that were pending. The ThunderSwordsman's special skill is the Chain Lightning and now that I've finished impementing Bast's Shield Wall, they both have 3 perfectly working skills. No bugs, no missing animations or sprites.

Now I'll focus on finishing the rest of the environment, and while I'm working on that, I'm getting help from a concept artist to make the The Eye and the fists.

[voltaicore]

If you need an audio engineer or audio producer be sure to message me so we can work something out for this project