Devlog #16 | Enemy Update 3

Welcome everyone, we are working on a fast paced 2D roguelike. You fight robots in a futuristic arena as a samurai while hyping up the crowd by playing fast.

This update took quite a while. One reason was that it was christmas and new years and ... a lot of stuff was going on. I also took it easy to recharge some energy.

The other reason is that it actually took a lot more work to rework the boss than expected. But the time spend was definetly worth it! The next update aims to finish the boss and this enemy update all together. Now lets talk about how I reworked the boss  

Inspiration

The boss fight lacked something and I couldn't tell what it was. I sat down and thought about boss fights I do like. What do I like about them and I can I add these things to my boss fight?

I loved playing splatoon 2. The boss fights been great! In it you dodge attacks by shooting yourself a path to fastly move in it and climbing the boss works the same way. You climb the boss to get to its weakpoint and damage it. That is only possible after the boss did it's attacks though. Essentially this is like a puzzle in which you need to find the path to dodge attacks and then the path to get up on the boss to finally damage him.

Putting it into work

I incorparated this by adding a generator. It's an enemy that teleports around every now and then. While the generator is alive, the boss has a shield. The shield damages you if you touch it and makes the boss invincible. So you destroy the generator to be able to damage the boss.

This way the boss fight has 2 parts. Part 1: Generator is alive -> Boss invincible and attacks you with (mostly) ranged attacks  Part 2: Generator is dead-> Boss gets stunned and is no longer invincible -> Boss fights you with close combat attacks

After some time the boss creates a new generator and summons thunderstrikes. This restarts the cycle. 

Once the boss takes enough damage he enters Stage 2 which is mostly the same with these differences:

• The generator now moves and teleports, making it harder to destroy.
• Boss Projectiles now reflect off the wall.
• When you destroy the generator the boss is not stunned. Instead he does his final and super flashy move. After it he is stunned.
• Almost all (working on it) of his attacks are stronger
• During thunderstorm the boss now also summons rapier eggs. After 12 seconds they become rapiers. Which is a rather strong enemy

No one sees it

If its bad, everyone notices. But when done well no one cares. With all the new attacks and more targets to follow, the camera became quite the challenge... until I remembered that I'm using cinemachine.

I switched from a normal virtual camera that tracks one object to one that tracks a group. Now I can just add a new target to the target group or take it out whenever I like. So it normally focuses on the player. When the boss spawns it focuses on both while the main focus is on the player. The generator can be added and taken out as well. When the boss does a big attack for which the whole fighting arena needs to be visible I can do that easily!

Camera is really hard to get right, so this is more like a first draft. It works and is effective, but I want it to also be pretty and smooth!

That's all folks!

This update focused on reworking the boss and as I said, this has been a lot of work. Next update will wrap this whole enemy update up by finishing the boss and doing some other cool stuff!

Thank you for reading and have a great day!