So... the alpha has been stagnating here for some time but there's been plenty of work going on with Jetboard Joust! I've been blogging the development over on TIGsource and on my personal blog but I thought I'd start updating here as well in case anyone is interested (more eyeballs makes for more feedback which makes for a better game)! Scroll to the bottom of this post to cut straight to the chase and see the final result... 

Normally I’d cover off a boss in one blog post but a) this one is proving more complex than the rest and b) I might have some more contract work coming up (which will mean another break from gamedev) so, as I’ve now finished the art and stage one attacks, I’m just going to share what I’ve got. Working title for this one is the Octopoid.

I decided to base this boss on an octopus as octopi are pretty creepy and some scientists reckon they’re descended from aliens(!) Plus it fits with the slightly Lovecraftian feel of some of the art. I was expecting the art to be really painful but actually it all came together fairly painlessly. Though it still took a long time I never felt like I was going down endless dead-ends and just didn’t have a clue what I was doing as I did with the Snapper and the Stinger bosses. Maybe I’m getting better at this, maybe my reference material was better, probably a combination of the two.

What did take a long time to get right was the ‘mouth’. As you can see from the first example here, I originally started as a mouth with teeth which, whilst I was happy with the animation, didn’t feel quite right to me. It felt too much like a skull and not enough like an octopus. I tried replacing this with a ‘beak’ type structure similar to a real octopus but this was my one major dead-end. Even though I spent half a day or so on it it just looked like shite and I had to totally ditch that approach.

In the end I settled on a very Cthulhu-esque mouth as a collection of tentacles. This seemed to work really well. It was a pain to animate but I cheated slightly by partially recycling the animation I had already created for the Squocket tentacles.

The eyes also looked too ‘dead’ in the original art so I lightened these considerably, worked on the hypnotic effect, and also enlarged them to make them more bulbous and less like empty sockets.

By far the hardest thing to get right though were the tentacles. I based the code for these on the segments for the ‘Squirmer‘ boss but initially this approach just didn’t work (as you can see from the first image). The ‘physics’ was all wrong and the tentacles moved in far too rigid a fashion, making them look like skeletal arms rather than tentacles. It took a LOT of tweaking before I was happy with the overall movement – the final algorithm still has something of a mind of its own and is very dependent on the values ‘keyed in’. Really I should probably be tweening between set angles for each segment rather than just moving the tip and expecting the algorithm to sort everything else out, but setting individual angles for 24 segments would be very time consuming to prepare without an editor. I think the algorithmic approach is a pretty successful ‘smoke and mirrors’ compromise.

Once the art was done the next thing to do was to work on the boss’s general movement and attacks for stage one. For the general movement I have it gravitating towards a strict horizontal or vertical rotation which I think looks better, there will probably be more variation to this in later phases. It’s a big boss which makes its movement somewhat clunky by nature, I think I may need to ensure that the levels in which this boss appears don’t have buildings that are too high otherwise the battle will feel too cramped.

The boss ‘swims’ towards the player with pulse-type movements timed to coincide with the movement of its tentacles.

I ended up with three different attack moves…

** Black Hole Blast ** Most octopi spit ink. This one spits black holes which suck the player towards them and drains their energy. It took a while to get the black holes right – I’ve ended up with three different animated geometry shaders overlaid plus a particle effect to give the impression of debris being sucked in. In order to spit ink the Octopoid must open it’s front tentacles and leave its mouth-parts vulnerable, this is its stage one weak spot!

** Tentacle Snap ** if the player is positioned directly in front of the Octopoid when its tentacles are open there’s a chance it’ll dash forward and snap its tentacles in an attempt to trap the player. There’s a short ‘tell’ for this as just beforehand it’s eyes will flash and its whole body quiver. The tentacle snap attack can be devastating if delivered accurately.

** Dive Bomb ** If the player is in a suitable position the Octopoid attempts a dive-bomb/stomp attack whereby it rotates itself upright and then slams itself to the ground. It takes a while to recover from this and so the attack servers a dual purpose in that there’s a short time window post-attack where the player can fly above the Octopoid to reach its opposite side without damage, a maneuver which is next to impossible otherwise.

More attack stages to come – I also need to add audio for the various attacks so far as this boss seems strangely silent at the moment!

Dev Time: 9 days Total Dev Time: approx 227 days