Designing a Boss
|
This week (or last depending on how you look at it) has been mostly about getting the boss designed and scripted. Our aesthetic goal for Umibozu is mystery, and in our boss fight is more a “run away from the boss” than actually fighting it. So the layout is as follows: The player goes out from the harbor in search for a missing person who allegedly was going into the mysterious waters where Umibozu is rumored to roam. After sailing through the mist and avoiding cliffs and sea creatures, the player finally arrives to the island where the missing person is shipwrecked. Apparently the person has been victim to Umibozu. The person quickly jumps on board and the player turns the ship around to head back towards the harbor. This is when Umibozu makes an appearance. To maintain the mystery of the mythical sea creature we chose to only show a dark shadow of Umibozu following the player under the water surface. The boss has two attacks, that the player needs to evade to make is back to the harbor safely. The first attack is spawning whirlpools in the vicinity of the player. These are scaled up from nothing to their full size in order to visualize that Umibozu in spawning them. Their life span is only a few seconds but many spawn. This forces the player to be on high alert to avoid them and not be placed to close to the edge of the screen, in order to have time to detect them. The whirlpools also spins so that it looks more logical. At the same time the dark shadow of Umibozu follows the player. Umobozu has tentacles that he launches across the screen to try and grab the player ship. These tentacles are positions just outside of the screen. Every 5 seconds one of the three tentacles is launched across the screen which forces the player to either fire the harpoon at the tentacle, to interrupt the attack and force the tentacle to retract, or just adjust the position of the ship to that the tentacles miss.
I am pretty satisfied with the result of the boss “fight” and the atmosphere is adds to the player experience. Out next step is going to make sure we have a few game testers so that we can balance the difficulty and make sure the experience if within reach for the players.
 |
