I made a penguin boss and some music!
Hello again! I spent the last two weeks thinking about boss fights and very little else, and I’m having the time of my life.
Penguin boss
I made a fully playable boss for my next game! It’s based on the penguin enemies and you can check it out here:
This is recorded on Very Hard difficulty, by the way! The boss is much less terrifying than this on Normal mode, don’t worry.
I was trying to figure out how bosses should even work in this game while I was making this boss, and I’m more than happy with how it ended up. Honestly I didn’t think boss fights in this game would be as fun as levels full of regular enemies, but this might be my favorite thing I have ever made. I hope you like the look of it too!
I had to draw a few new sprites during this process. My favorite is this cute bubble shield that pops up when a boss breaks out of a combo, to let you know that it’s invincible and that you should avoid its revenge attack:
The rest of the game’s boss fights will probably follow a similar formula: the boss creates hazards in the arena, then they chase you down and attack you directly while you try to avoid the hazards. Some bosses will have weak direct attacks and will rely on overwhelming you with hazards like this penguin boss, and some of them will have fewer hazards and stronger direct attacks, either by having complex attack patterns or by making you fight more than one boss at once. It’s sort of like bosses in bullet hell shmups which shoot bullets directly at you to force you to move, and fill the screen with patterns of bullets that make it harder for you to move.
Now that I have a much better understanding of how this game’s bosses should work, and now that I’ve written all of the code for spawning various patterns of projectiles and doing different types of reversal attacks, the rest of the game’s bosses should hopefully be easier to make. But I want to make sure actually the case, so I’m about to start making some more bosses to see if I can do it faster this time!
COMPOST #4 - A Cake For You
I entered a fun casual music-making event called COMPOST, where everyone is given a theme and has to try to make a piece of music in 1-2 hours. I was too tired to make anything on the day of the competition, but I ended up making a song on the next day for fun and submitting it as a late entry instead. Better late than never!
My song is called A Cake For You, and it's about making a cake for someone you love. I wanted to play around with K.K. Slider style late 90s MIDI guitar sounds and this was a great excuse to do so!
You can see and listen to it here or on YouTube. I hope you like it!
Anything else?
Outside of work, I played some more Guwange and I tried the new demo of Angeline Era, which is an interesting bump combat action RPG that almost feels like the exact opposite of the game I’m making, in the sense that its movement and combat feel very analogue and loose and it’s full of lots of optional quiet areas to explore. I really like it! And if you want all action and no downtime, there’s even an arcade mode in the demo!
Hopefully I’ll have some more bosses to show you soon. Have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!