Another week, and more boss madness! Right now our main focus is trying to develop Zhamla’s combat identity. The first version of his fight is very on rails, and even though it is pretty difficult for many players at that point in the game, it’s far from what would be a good final boss, especially after fighting bosses like Luke and Bishop. Therefore, we are moving away from his heavily pattern-based AI to something more intense! Our first goal with the fight is to create a strong sense of threat – it’s something that’s is a little trickier/more expensive to achieve when the boss consists of one large sprite and each animation is costly to produce (big sprites = longer to animate), so we are trying to find ways to give him a lot of oomph without having to add a lot of animations. After all, we too would very much like to release this game sooner rather than later by now :)

Here’s a little bit of gameplay from one of our recent iterations. You can see a bunch of Zhamla’s attacks and new patterns here, along with the inferno you saw the work in progress of a couple weeks ago:

Work on the production book continues as well. When I first started writing it, we used a vertical layout, but now that we’re starting to move into editing and thinking a little bit more about the layout of each page, we’ve swapped to horizontal to get a better feel for how things will look in the end. A horizontal layout allows us to include larger and more detailed screenshots and progress pictures, which is pretty important since a lot of the development is on the visual side. I’ve already made a few custom images that will be featured in the book as well!

Here’s a little sneak peek of one featuring hats:

Now, after today we’ll be taking some time off to celebrate christmas and new years with the family. The next recap will be available on the 9th of January, after we’ve been back at the office for a week. Please enjoy the holidays and make sure to spend as much time with your loved ones as possible!

Until next time :)

This week work on the production book has continued, now with the second draft! For the first draft I basically put in every single piece of information about our development without any overarching shape or structure, a lot of it directly copy-pasted from our old blog posts. Now it’s time to cut out stuff and rewrite it in a way that actually makes sense. It can be tempting to include every little detail about the development, but in the end, I believe it’s better to have a book that is shorter and more focused on the truly interesting parts, rather than one that is bloated with things that might be boring to read about.

This is also where I start to consider the layout of the book, making sure the length of the paragraphs match up to make each page look alright. Once all the text has been (re)written, edited once more and approved, I’ll go through the entire thing once more and make a proper graphic design for each section. In other words, there’s still quite a way to go, but progress remains steady!

As for Teddy and Fred, they’re still doing the whole final bosses and cutscenes thing, but this week has been so focused on spoiler-y stuff that there won’t be much of an update from that department! Stay tuned for more stuff next week instead :)

After having spent a lot of time on the battle against Dad, it’s time to start looking into the final final battle – that against Zhamla. You’ve already met Zhamla once, so you know a little bit about what to expect – it’s gonna be a tough battle ahead!

One of the things we’ve played around with for this encounter is how intense of an inferno will fill the room during the battle. Here’s some of our progress, ranging from almost none to maximum inferno:

In these versions we hadn’t yet adjusted the size or shape of the inferno fire, so we made a version with one better fitting the room as well:

In the end, this is probably pretty close to what we’ll go for. It might be a bit towards the busy side, but on the other hand it is the final battle!

Other than the usual cutscenes and boss programming and animating, Fred has made a bunch of animations for the artefacts you found throughout the game. Here’s one of them:

Stay tuned for more! :)