Io Dev Blog 4

March 24th, 2020 ~ April 6th, 2020

Prototyping more boss attacks

Wall Attack Prototyping

The Wall attack is an attack for the final boss of the game, in which the boss swings its sword, and sends walls of crystals/ swords flying from the right side of the screen, with a small hole that the player can jump or teleport through in order to avoid damage. It was designed by a designer in the Boss Pod. After some experiementation, I decided that the easiest way to create the walls was to have each wall be composed of two rectangular projectiles on the same x-coordinates, and slightly apart so there would be an empty space between them. Each set of walls would have two stages, for the the first stage, they would stay still beyond the screen for set amount of time, differing for each set so they would consecutively start moving, and in the second stage, they would move left for a set amount of time, and despawn. Like the previous attack, it took quite a while to get the timing for each of the projectiles correct. In total, this process took about 6 hours.

Crystal Slam Attack Prototyping (Continued)

After prototyping the Crystal Slam Attack in the previous sprint, I was tasked with refining it after the designers made several key changes to the process of the attack. Instead of the crystal spikes all coming out of the floor at one time, they would start coming out of the ground consecutively starting from one side. This was done by having a seperate projectile prefab for each spike. Each one would have 2 stages, where in the first stage, it would stay under the floor for a set amount of time, which would be different for each prefab, and in the second stage, it would move upward out of the ground, for a set amount of time, which would be the same for each prefab, and after these two stages ended, it would despawn. Like the prototyping process for the previous version of the attack, it took quite a while to get the timing for each the projectiles correct. There were some slight complications where I found a bug that caused the later stages of each projectile from activating, which took a while to resolve, and I ended up contacting the developer of the projectile script, who fixed the bug after some effort. In total, this process took about 6 hours.

Wall Slam Attack Prototyping

The Wall Slam attack is an attack for the final boss of the game that combines the slam and wall attacks that were developed previously. The boss first jumps up and slams into the ground and causes the spikes to come up from the ground, and then walls of crystals start coming from the right of the screen. So the player will have to jump and teleport through the moving walls while being unable to touch the ground because of the spikes. This attack was prototyped by using prefabs that were developed for the previous two attacks, and modifiying them so they would work together. Like the other two attacks, it took quite a while to get the timing for each projectile right, and since this attack is multifaceted, unlike the previous attacks, I took a significant amount of time to playtest it to tweak the timing and speed to make sure the player would be able to get through it. This process took around 6 hours.

Limitations and Future Tasks

Unfortunately, because the animations and the assets for the boss attacks had not been implemented yet, the attacks still look very unfinished when playing. For the slam attacks, the boss does not move at all and stands still because the animation for the boss slaming into the floor does not exist. Also, since there are no art assets for the spikes and walls, they are currently using crystal assets which are stretched to match the dimensions needed. Thankfully, the animations and assets should be ready by the end of the next sprint.

WolverineSoft Labs

For the WolverineSoft Labs, most teams have finished implementing all of their main mechanics, and are ready to begin the beta phase, where no new assets or mechanics will be added. Several students reached out to me for instruction on Git usage, and I livestreamed a short tutorial over Discord. Labs meetings are also now held over Discord, using the livestream function to show any presentation slides.