Week 7 - Fighting Spirit

This week didn't see a lot of progress overall, due to a large amount of work from other classes taking up the majority of my time, however I did manage to make good progress on the boss fight in preparation for the alpha build.

To start things off, I took all the moves the boss would have, and started figuring out the conditions from which they would trigger. I didn't want the boss' attack patterns to be entirely predictable, but I also didn't want it to be 100% random. It needed a degree of logic to it, and I wanted certain attacks to only trigger past certain health thresholds. I laid out every boss state and assigned certain conditions to them; Things such as the player being within a certain range, health requirements, the state the move is transitioning from. Then I assigned OR and AND operators to all of the conditions so that I would know how to program the transitions in code.

Once this was done, I got to work on implementing some states. I started with the walk state, as it was the easiest. In this state, the boss simply walks forwards towards the player for around a second before stopping. From this state, it will either transition back to the idle state, or transition into an attacking state if the player is close enough/far enough. As none of the boss animations are completed yet, I used the same technique I used with the player and assigned colours to each animation as a placeholder, so that I knew which state the boss was in.

Next, I implemented the attack state. The boss stands still and swings its hammer down, creating a shockwave. I haven't created the shockwave object yet, so at the moment it just triggers a debug statement. For this, I gave the boss a hitbox gameobject just like the player's, and animated it using a white square as a placeholder. In the final animation, the hitbox won't have a sprite as it'll be part of the boss' sprite.

Next, I implemented the lunge attack. In this attack, the boss, charges up with anticipation, before dashing forwards very quickly. The player must jump over the boss to avoid this attack. This attack also has a relatively long cooldown, so the player has more time to damage the boss or heal. This is a three-stage attack, and I used Unity's animator to separate these stages more easily.

Next, I implemented the basic fireball attack functionality. In this attack, the boss swings his weapon upwards, dragging it along the ground first. I haven't implemented the fireballs for the boss yet, but they very slightly home in on the player. For this implementation, I just implemented the basic timing of the swing, as well as debug trigger events for when the fireballs shoot out.

The last attack I added this week was the boss' jump attack. This attack triggers if the player is above the boss. When this state is triggered, the boss detects the last position the player was at, charges for a bit, and then jumps towards that position, before slamming the weapon back down on the ground. This attack was somewhat tricky to implement, as it required getting Unity's gravity physics to be strong enough that the boss wouldn't be too floaty.

Finally, I also worked with Herman in determining the sound effects needed for the game, so that we can schedule time to record sounds and edit them to implement for the beta build.

For the next week, I will work on finishing the implementation of the last few states; the pillar state, and the final stand bullet hell state. For the alpha build, I will also be implementing the AI for the basic enemies seen in the first area, implementing the player's HUD, and making the upgrade screen work with the core gameplay loop.

This week was a slow week for all of us because we all had a lot of work to do throughout the week, so not a lot of progress was made. For the next week, I will be making sure everyone completes their tasks on time so that we have time to test the build before Friday next week, particularly on the implementation side. The art side of things is slightly ahead of where myself and Nathan are on the code, so it is mainly up to the two of us to complete the implementation on time.

Until next time.