Development Blog

Lots of things have been happening and unfolding, which is why I haven’t had the time to sit down and write earlier. Right now there are a couple of things happening in life that are a bit challenging. Hopefully they’ll be over soon.
The game’s walking as usual: a bit slowly, but steadily. I’ve recently been working on a boss named Näule. Can’t show you pictures of it yet, but I can show you the stairway leading up to its room:

Doing the bosses in this game is interesting because of how the game mechanics work. Though Alicia is a wizard with spells she can use from afar, she can also become pretty powerful in direct combat, so bosses must be designed to account for these two ways of attack.

Super Metroid and Castlevania’s bosses have pre-defined patterns, which is a lot better than a randomly-moving boss, but you can freely attack them at any stage until they die (granted, SMetroid is a bit more sophisticated than that). Doing it this way would make designing bosses easier, since you just design offensive patterns that the player must avoid, but I’ve found this developed design more interesting:

To compare, Zelda OOT basically has two patterns with bosses: 1) The boss is invulnerable: thematised mechanics with x amount of patterns that eventually put the boss in direct reach, after which 2) the boss becomes vulnerable: you can damage it and eventually kill it with your sword. Otherwise, the pattern repeats. I think every other weapon or skill doesn’t damage the bossses—they all work to get the boss close to you and your sword. There’s something satisfying about this kind of patterning. What I like about it is that it gives you just a small window to do any damage instead of being able to do it at any point during the battle. It feels more like a story to defeat bosses that way.

The difference I see with HFA is that you can damage bosses with your whip up close, but, opposite to OOT, you can also attack from a distance with spells of equal or greater power than your whip. I don’t want to exempt bosses from this kind of attack, since it’s very satisfying to submit them to the same abuse as normal enemies. I find it interesting how this forces me to design bosses that are built around that big advantage.

Anyway, on a completely different matter, I went to a gamejam a couple of weeks ago. It turned out to be really tiring, but fun! We had around a day to finish something, which is certainly more restrictive than 48 or 72 hours, so we were lucky to have anything wrapped up in the end. It’ll be fun to try something else in a future gamejam.

If you’re wondering, I did try assembling 4 of those cubes in many colour-combinations, but they never transformed into a crafting table ):