Boss design
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The narrative in Beelonging is that a bear is attacking the protagonist’s beehive and it needs to be saved. Naturally, the boss and the main antagonist of the game is the bear. Setting out to design this end stage of our game, the initial idea was to have most of the bear’s body visible. This was done with a sprite depicting it standing upright on its back legs, with two additional sprites for its front legs. With this done the bear could swing its paws. The complication of this was the immense size difference between the boss and the player. The tall bear covered the frame top to bottom on the right side of the screen but was thin enough to leave a lot of space between itself and the very left of the game. The player’s bees would naturally be in a position located on the far left and the problem that we encountered was the bears attack range. The perspective we had forced the boss to lunge forward for it to even be able to reach the bees with its body proportionate legs. This was to prevent safe spots for the player but made the fight incredibly difficult as there was barely any space left for the player to flee. The state of the fight we had then didn’t work out, but we managed to redesign it without having to change the sprites. The major alteration we made was the perspective. The full body was switched to only neck and head, with its paws sticking up from below. Even if this version required a more zoomed view, it actually gave the player more space to move around in as the bears lunge wouldn’t be there to restrict it.  |