Boss design
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This week I will be writing about the design of the boss in our game and how we can make a large boss that moves in an interesting way while still being easy to draw. We wanted the boss to be huge, to stay true to the game concept. But trying to make the boss as one big sprite would make it tedious for the artists to draw and animate. That’s when i got some inspiration from one of the bosses of Metroid Fusion for the Gameboy Advance. The boss in question is basically a snake that consists of several body segments, attached to each other like a long chain. When the head moves, the other body segments follow after. With this design we can have a boss that is large but still having fluid movement. Each boss segment have a start and end attachment joint where each subsequent segments start joint snaps to the previous segments end joint. To move the boss we only have to move the head segment. This causes the head to be temporarily detached from the rest of the segments. We then make the rest of the body follow by first rotating the next segment so that the heads end joint is aligned with both of the next segments joints. Lastly the segment is moved towards the head segment until the start and end joints align again. This process is then repeated for all segments in a similar fashion. This process is demonstrated for a single segment in the picture below.
This system made it easy to create the boss charge attack, where the boss targets the position on the screen where the player currently is, and then charge towards that position after a short amount of time. The body curves along nicely and gives the boss an organic feel. During the battle scene, most of the boss body is outside the screen. That’s because we had planed to have a second boss phase that triggers when the boss have taken enough damage. During this scene the screen would zoom out and the massive size of the boss would be revealed, making the player feel small and overwhelmed.  |
