Devlog Week 4

Devlog 4

This week was another productive week! At least for the first half. I managed to get plenty of things done this week again, boss behavior, bloom, making the boss arena more aesthetic, adding some sound effects here and there (not finished though), adding a menu, buttons and game over screens, a cool boss health bar and even managed to get the inverse kinematics working thanks to Ian, which I can put to use next week. 

Firstly, the boss now alternates between selecting moves to use (the laser beam and the spike attacks) and moving between the 3 points in the stage. The boss can select up to three attacks before moving positions, and does this continuously until the boss or the player dies. The trickiest part of this was choosing which attacks to call a function for. In hindsight, I could have just made a variable relating to the attacks and done a loop to check which of the up to three attacks were a spike attack or laser attack. Instead, I managed to assign the functions themselves to variables and call variables, which was cool

Secondly, I added post processing effects (bloom) to the game, of which the tutorials were really handy. Bloom added some nice glow to the sword swings, player and works really well in making the enemy attacks stand out more. In particular, the laser attack I think looks really nice! Also, I recoloured some stuff and made the stage a little darker to emphasize these bright points, which does stray from the intended colour palette, but I prefer how it looks now over how it would have with that palette. 

Nice new stage (i think the gradients look nice)

Glowy laser beam attack

I also added a victory screen and a game over screen, although there isn’t an option to restart yet.

A skill issue

A simple main menu

You’ll notice in some of the screenshots, there is also a red healthbar at the bottom of the screen, which looks really cool since it uses linear interpolation which makes the yellow health bar go down at a smooth rate (its behind the red healthbar).

Finally, with the help of Ian, the arms now properly move on both side with inverse kinematics, which I can now use to help telegraph attacks and make make the boss look cooler.

Ignore the layering issues, it has cool arms now!

There was no feedback this week since I think it was moved to Monday and I couldn’t attend Monday’s one, in this case I’ll soon put it in the game feedback channel and get feedback for it there. Next week, I’ll probably work on some polish, restarting more boss attacks and implementing the inverse kinematics.