Development Log #7

Welcome to Devlog 7!

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Week 7

Hello Everyone! Welcome to this week's Devlog. For this week we decided to take a traditional route and incorporate a BOSS FIGHT! I was super stoked to hear this and couldn't wait to see what we could come up with. The boss fight game was called management where you first start out as a paper boy and had to deliver weird mysterious packages to some people around a block.. however what you don't know is that your boss was really your boss(fight).

THEME – Boss Fight / Management

IDEA

The idea that sparked interest to me was a typical center boss with dodge mechanics and some form of a damaging component. With this in mind we decided on a platforming boss that would track your characters movements. The ground was made up of hexagonal tiles that surrounded the boss. After some form of the bosses moves the ground would fall leaving the player with less floor tiles to run around on. In order to damage the boss after a specific combo the boss became vulnerable to an attack by the player. With all these ideas in mind we got to work.

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GROUND AREA

To begin with the development process we quickly setup a character and the flooring. The character is played in third person and when moving to the right or left the floor actually rotated. This gave the feel as if the character was moving around the boss without having to keep the player's rotation centered on the boss. In order to get all the tiles to rotate together we just made them a child object of one main floor object and rotated all of them together. This was a success.

PLAYER

GROUND

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BOSS

After getting the environment setup it was now time for the main component of this game. The boss was very tricky and honestly really fun! The first thing we did was found a cool model and scaled it to the size of a colossus (really big entity). This was the center piece that fit in the middle of the ground. After some time of brainstorming my partner and I came up with some basic move sets and what the boss would do after being damaged. To say the least this was going to be challenging as we never done anything like this but we couldn't wait to get started on the move set.

The first move that we added to the boss was just a simple side swipe. The boss would cock his arm back and would swipe across the ground to try and smack the character. In order to do this we went to a free animation website called Mixamo. Here we used a mutant pack with some tweaks here and there for the bosses animations. Anyways from the first attack we needed a way to see if the player would get hit without using colliders. That way would be too expensive since we could animate the collider for the boss and instead found out the frame in which the boss was swinging at the player and made a "Hit Box" where it would check if the player was inside of it. If so, the player got hit during that specific frame of the animation. In the GIFS below there is an example. Once we got that figured out it was time to add a health bar to our player. I won't go over all the attacks that we made for the boss but there are three in total and each time the boss takes damage it gets a new attack pattern.

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DAMAGING THE BOSS

After we had the boss in place we needed to allow the player to win. For this I came up with a solution to freeze frame an animation for a period of time after one of the bosses attacks and show these platforms that the player can use to traverse to the bosses head and with the power of animation do some crazy smash attack and damage the boss! This part was very difficult as I had to stop the animation at one frame and once it was stopped a function call would allow some platforms to appear which allowed the player to jump up to the bosses head. The next part was to actually damage the boss in which the player presses a key/button to damage the boss when in the right area. The boss then does a damage animation and has a minor plasma explosion in the back of the head to show the player that it did in fact damage the boss. With some UI we added some health bars to both the player and boss. This made it a lot easier for the player to see how close he/she is to completing or losing the fight. Without showing off too many spoilers I am going to leave it here.

BOSS ANIMATIONS

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ENDING

That is all we had for this week's Devlog. I hope to see you guys next time! All photos from this Devlog post will be updated in the gallery so be sure to check it out and have a good day!