Minor changes since the last update two weeks ago.
- Various menu improvements, such as a control explanation screen in the main menu, as well as the pause menu.
- Holy water explosion graphical layer properly set.
- Arcade mode blanks refill periodically, which is necessary for them to be a relevant gameplay mechanic.
- The long overdue restart from the pause menu added, which saves the player having to exit the campaign/arcade upon death.
- Various bugs related to the restart were fixed, such as grenades not being refilled, or the shield hurt sound misplaying.
- Enemies no longer maintain their momentum upon player death, leading them to go offscreen.
- Fixed the first test boss getting borked.
- Minor changes to various enemies, such as adding an additional state to the machine gun soldiers.
There are two main changes in this update. First, I’m still experimenting with different bosses. For example, below we see Mecha Greenblatt, the programmer art version.
A lot of the boss inspiration comes from Shmups. This is fine, to a certain point. Shmups are a great genre after all, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The first prototype boss I created, Mecha Soros, is essentially a Shmup boss, and it plays pretty well.
However, I think it’s potentially more interesting when the boss deliberately positions themselves relative to the player, most simply through following the player around. That’s why I gave Mecha Greenblatt two floating hands which he uses to slam the player. Since he stops when he does this, there’s something of a risk/reward play where you want him to get close enough to whiff his attacks. It might not be the most visually coherent thing in the world, but it is fun to play.
In the very first update I mentioned that there was a flaw with the campaign that is not unique to this game. In order to maintain difficulty, we need a roughly consistent number of enemies. To facilitate this the level spawns waves of enemies, but this doesn’t work so well at the end, when they are mostly dead. As a result, the ending is somewhat anti-climactic, since you’re just doing a mop op operation at that point.
To solve this problem I start spawning in FBI agents after the last wave has spawned in, with the spawn rate of the FBI agents increasing as time goes by. When the player kills all the non-FBI enemies then a teleporter spawns in, and the player beats the level by touching it.
This is not particularly well conveyed to the player, so you basically just need to understand that this is how things work, or you’ll eventually get overrun by the feds.
I’m going to blitz through a variety of boss experiments between now and the next update. Worst case scenario I can always just copy the shmup bosses that already exist.
