Day 7: Bossy Behaviours

And it’s over! A very intense week of work to produce something that I am pretty proud of. Let’s see what we got up to!

Day 7

I started the day fairly light. There was some extra work I needed to do on the forest level generator so that it wouldn’t produce unusable levels. I suspect there’s still a few bugs in my level generation code, but catching them is surprisingly hard. Might need to rework it all later.

After that, I got some introductory text added to the game, setting up the plot overtly, as well as hinting that the player should look at their lexicon to know what’s happening. I had to stretch my writing skills to convey the right message without landing entirely on clichés. I think I struck a good balance.

After this, I wanted to design a boss. I am so glad I was on stream for this, because the design input I had from gruebite about what the boss could do was invaluable. The fight is more interesting and dynamic than it would have been had I designed it.

Implementing the boss required me to add a more complex behaviour for casting spells at the player (basically, creatures can build their own spells from a collection of words now), as well as coming up with the “Buffer” behaviour. Up to now, monsters would either ignore the player, or chase them. The Buffer lands inbetween. it moves the enemy to some minimum distance. if the player tries to get closer, they will try to back away and maintain it. It leads to a more interesting “dance” as you circle each other, or get cornered. I’m so happy with it, far more interesting and dynamic than I expected. I think there’s a lot of game design applicability to it and I’m going to keep it for the future.

The last piece I really needed for the fight was for the boss to summon “illusions”. Weaker forms of the same entity. For this to happen, entities needed to spawn other entities, something this engine has never had to do before. I got it set up pretty easily, apart from one minor disaster.

I think that this game is far more interesting when you’re outnumbered, so having additional foes to worry about is great.

I reused the room generator from Acolyte Pledge’s boss fight, with some adjustments to include our new terrain features (and make it larger), and I think it makes for a tidy experience. Tacking on an ending screen really completed the experience. It was another writing challenge, because I wanted to indicate that the story continues, but you won’t be playing it, and I found that tricky. We got there though.

With this out of the way, I needed to make sure that the rest of the game experience looked reasonably polished… so I built up the title screen… which turned into a title animation. I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted it to work, and so I just made it happen.

With this done, we were onto the final features before I had to call it a night.

• Monster variety: I tried to add more foes to deal with. I managed to put in Elementals. They take on a single elemental aspect with their own unique spells to cast, and thus should be a good challenge. This was a little peculiar, because I didn’t want to have to specify in the config all the different kinds of elemental, so that actually gets handle by code when the elemental spawns.
• Hunger clock: I realised that with no healing in the game, your chances of reaching the bottom weren’t great. I have had food in the game for a while but it didn’t do anything. Now, when you descend between floors, if you have food, you recover to full HP. It’s a less punishing version of the traditional hunger clock, and I think it’s a good solution.

I submitted the game, and finally, went to sleep (it was midnight!)

Conclusions

With that, I think the game stands on its own. I definitely overscoped, and I wish I’d had another day or two to really fill out the content, but it’s a good demonstration of the idea, and possibly ripe for expansion, depending on the response.

I really enjoyed streaming while I worked on this. It helps me keep focused, and especially on this final day, I had a lot of interaction, leading to a good back and forth of opinions and feedback. I appreciate everyone who stopped by.

On balance, I’m really proud of the game framework/engine/toolkit I’ve built up for myself here. Although in places it was a lot of effort, I was able to reuse a lot of utilities from previous games. The only thing that needed a heavy reimplementation was the UI toolkit, and this new version has the potential to last for a long time.

A lot of new features were much easier to add than I expected, and even in some cases, was 90% implemented already. Of course, I found a couple of bugs in it as well, but what’ll you do!

Now I can rest, relax, catch up on my sleep, and soon, play all the other amazing entries! That’s all for now. See you next year!