The footsie slime, the disco boar, and music
Hello! I've been so much more relaxed this week than I have been for the last few months. I got prescribed some medicine that I previously had to spend a lot of money on privately, some hand problems and sleep problems that I was having (unrelated to the medicine) seem to have fixed themselves, and a bunch of other good things happened. So I’ve been having a great time working on various parts of my game, such as…
The footsie slime
The footsie skeleton is one of my favorite classic videogame enemies. If you’re not familiar with them, the fighting game player Beautifuldude streamed Castlevania for the NES in the early days of Twitch and fought against a skeleton enemy who was surprisingly good at staying out of range and using projectiles to cover its approaches. People joked about it being "the footsie skeleton" and became a bit of a meme in the fighting game community as a result. If you haven't seen it before, here it is. Please excuse the deep-fried gif compression:
I love the footsie skeleton. It's a great demonstration of how you can make an exciting and engaging action game encounter even in a 1v1 fight on a flat plane with ultra basic mechanics, if you give the enemy fast movement and interesting decision making.
Recently I was thinking about the footsie skeleton again, for probably the hundredth time in my life. But this time I got carried away thinking about whether or not I would be able to adapt that into my game, to make a fight that would be fun even on a single-tile-wide bridge. No sidestepping, just left-and-right 1D action gameplay on a grid. A couple of days later I became curious enough about it that I had to try making it. So I created the footsie slime:
I love them! I'm biased because I love fighting games, but I think it's a really fun change of pace from the game's other enemies and bosses. Thankfully it's not quite so terrifying on the easier difficulty modes, but Very Hard mode is a fun challenge for fighting game sickos. Here’s the video of the full fight, if you want to see more:
Disco boar
The other new boss is the disco boar. I had so much fun making the spike boss that I wanted to make another boss who filled the floor with pretty patterns, and this is what I ended up with. Its slow-moving cyan wall attack is surprisingly difficult to dodge when you’re having to avoid the magenta floor patterns at the same time!
Music
At this point I have enough bosses that I want to move onto something else. I’ll come back and make the rest of the game’s bosses later in development, once I have a better idea of what the different areas and dungeons look like and what sort of bosses they’ll need.
So I’m going to start working on the game’s music! I really want to go for a mid 90s arcade music sound, with MIDI instrument samples from a Roland SC-88 Pro being crunched up to sound like they’re being fed through arcade hardware.
For anyone who followed me in my fighting game tournament days and saw the combo videos that I made, you probably know what kind of background music I enjoy the most in action games (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). So I did some digging to see if I could find any games that already had this kind of action movie fight scene jazz music. Metal Slug gets pretty close a couple of times (like here and here), but eventually I stumbled upon a Lupin the 3rd game for the Sega Saturn that was exactly what I was looking for! Check it out here (timestamp 21:10) if you want to hear some extremely energetic MIDI jazz.
Now that I have a much better idea of what I want to aim for in terms of instrument sounds and mixing/production, I've been doing my best to hit that target and make some perfectly arcade game sounding jazz. I don't have anything to show yet, but I'm starting to make progress.
Anything else?
I can’t stop playing Gun.Smoke. This time I got carried away with all of the side gimmick leaderboards that came with the game on Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium, such as playing the game on the hardest difficulty setting or literally playing it at double speed. It’s even sillier than it sounds, and I wrote about it here (which includes a video) if you want to see what it’s like.
And that’s all I’ve done! The hand problems and sleep problems that I alluded to at the start of this post had made it hard for me to do much other than work on my games, but thankfully I’m back to normal again. I’m looking forward to working more on my game and living life outside of work, and I hope you have a great couple of weeks too. See you next time!