Hello! In the past two weeks I created a minimap for my next game’s adventure mode, started the long process of designing and creating boss fights, and made some flame moles.

Minimap

I added a minimap to my next game’s adventure mode! I originally planned on just copying the minimap from Chessplosion’s dungeon mode, but my next game’s gameplay area takes up almost the entire screen so I had to cram it into a much smaller space. It’s hopefully going to have local and online co-op too, so I wanted people to be able to see the minimap at all times instead of having to keep pausing the game to look at it. Here’s how it looks:

And here it is up close:

I tried making using the whole thing a flat semi-transparent shade and I tried using a fully fake-transparent checkerboard effect for the entire map, but I ended up going with solid walls and slightly transparent checkerboarded rooms.

I'm happy with how it turned out! It's small, it's unintrusive, and it doesn't have a ton of features but it does its job.

In case you’re curious why I’m even adding a minimap in the first place, there are a couple of reasons. The game is much more focused on action more than exploration and I don’t want people to get lost. And if someone randomly explores really far and they lose all their health without finding a save point, the fact that they uncovered more of the map hopefully means that they’ll feel like they made a small amount of progress.

Flame moles

I woke up last monday morning and decided to make a version of the mole enemies who throw a wave of flames at the player. I like them!

Bosses

I just started programming boss fights in my game! I love the bosses in bullet hell shmups and the Ys series, with their overlapping attack patterns and their bullets that spawn even more bullets. And I love lots of bosses in beat em ups and character action games, especially the ones who you’re allowed to interrupt and combo just like any other regular enemy.

So I put an enemy in a room, gave them lots of health, put a big health bar at the bottom of the screen (with placeholder sprites) and started the long process of turning them into a boss fight.

The first problem is that it’s really easy to do infinite combos in this game! That’s completely fine when normal enemies go down in two hits, but it’s less than ideal for bosses:

I could solve this by just removing hitstun on bosses (i.e. giving them super armor), so they won’t get interrupted by your attacks. But I like interrupting bosses’ attacks, so instead I made a system that lets them escape from your combos after a while:

It uses a mixture of a timer and a hit counter, so you can sneak in an extra hit or two if you combo an enemy against a wall.

Now that I have a boss who can escape from combos, I can start giving them some attacks! Some easy ways to give them interesting attack patterns would be to let them spawn additional enemies or objects, or to give them some custom-animated melee attack sequences. Because of that, I’m currently concentrating on trying to make a fun 1v1 fight against a projectile-firing boss! If I can get this feeling fun, I’m confident that I’ll be able to make a full game of fun bosses.

I want to keep pretty much all of my projectiles’ positions locked to the grid in this game, just like in Chessplosion. That limits the ways that a boss can attack you, so I doodled as many ideas for projectile attacks as I could:

Bosses could shoot wide walls of projectiles, bursts of projectiles in cardinal or diagonal directions, or projectiles that can shoot even more projectiles as they move. I think these building blocks should be enough me to create lots of fun projectile-based boss attack patterns, and then for the rest of the bosses I can mix things up with melee attacks, additional enemies, and gimmicks and setpieces.

I just finished programming these boss attack building blocks immediately before writing this newsletter, but I haven’t had the time to build a fun boss yet. Hopefully I’ve got something cool to show off next time!

Anyway, that’s everything I’ve done. Outside of work I loved this lecture by Kate Beaton, the latest Patreon preview build of Lonely Wolf Treat, and Guwange, Cave’s strange shmup with gallery/crosshair shooter influences. Check them out if they sound interesting to you. I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!