The BitBull Blog

I thought six days on the last one was extreme but this one has taken me pretty much eight full days. Probably over 50% of that time spent on the art. Basically these have pretty much morphed into ‘miniboss’ type creatures with multiple attack patterns (and in this case even spawning smaller enemies) which was never my intention but I feel like I have to kind of go with the flow. I am really struggling with motivation now though, this project is dragging on and on and ON and to be spending so much time on one thing at this late stage is extremely demoralising. I need to be earn some sodding money. Enough of my moaning though…

I decided to make this enemy a giant deep sea fish as deep sea creatures are weird, alien and creepy looking and have already been used for inspiration on some of the other enemies such as the squocket. My main source of inspiration was a fish called the fangtooth which seemed to have the right balance between looking weird and dangerous whilst maintaining an iconic fishy shape. I’m calling it the ‘snapper’.

Creating the basic shape in pixelart wasn’t too difficult and I didn’t go down nearly as many dead-ends as I did with the stinger so the process, whilst just as time-consuming, wasn’t nearly as frustrating. Most of the time I always felt like I was making progress. The scales were the hardest part to get right – it’s large area to cover and it’s tough to get the balance right. Not enough detail and things look flat and boring, too much detail and things look too ‘photographic’ and don’t gel with the rest of the game’s style. When the scales were defined as a simple filled pattern they looked too ‘flat’, like I’d obviously filled a stencilled area. If I applied too much shading to them they almost looked too ‘3D’ and ‘realistic’. In the end I offset the scales based on a pattern of concentric circles to give a slightly rounder shape to the body, limited myself to three different scale tones and didn’t allow a change of tone within an individual scale. This took forever but it finally seemed to give me the right degree of detail whilst maintaining a sense of stylised simplicity.

I thought the teeth and gills would be hard to draw but actually those parts came together really quickly, as did the ‘skull’ for the zombie attack phase. The spikes on the spine were rather more finicky and still need a bit of tidying up.

The other reason this took so long was that collision detection on an enemy of this size gets rather more complex. When I began work on the game I didn’t have ‘boss’ type enemies in mind so assumed I could implement a simple ‘one size fits all’ collision detection system. Unfortunately this doesn’t cut it when you have enemies that are complex shapes, some areas that act as ‘hot spots’ for damage, and other areas that you may want to collide with the player but not actually take damage themselves. I needed to find a way to allow for all this whilst avoiding having to go back and redo old code (particularly checking all the weapons again).

In the end I came up with a ‘CollisionProxy’ class. A CollisionProxy is spawned from a parent (the main sprite) and will both take and inflict damage on behalf of its parent (or not depending on the configuration). It also renders with a custom shader in sync with its parent when taking damage. Any sprite can have any number of proxies. So far this system seems to work well and I’ve hardly had to change any of my core code to implement it.

There’s also polygon-based collision detection on this enemy. Up until now I have been able to get away with simple rectangle-based collision detection. Thankfully I had already implemented SAT-based collision detection for convex polygons when I first ported my game engine to MonoGame so I had no extra work to do there – Thank God!! I think trying to add something like that at this stage would probably have killed me!

In its final(?) incarnation the snapper has three attack phases…

Stage One
Tracks the player fairly slowly. Unleashes either an aggressive charge/snap attack or spawns electric jellyfish from its mouth. Its jaws do more damage than the rest of its body and it will only take damage if you fire directly into its mouth (this was a PITA to implement collision-wise).

Stage Two
Loses its flesh and becomes a steampunk zombie fish. In this mode tracking of the player is faster and it’s two mounted ‘shredder‘ weapons are armed and fully dangerous. You need to destroy the engine mounted on its side to proceed to the next phase.

Stage Three
Now on its last legs (if it had any) the snapper tracks the player very quickly. It’s only defence at this point is a very aggressive kamikaze charge attack.

And that, at last, is it. Painful, but I think it was probably worth it. I’ve had some of the best feedback for the game so far from some of these images on Twitter. There’s still a few things I’m not 100% happy with. Art-wise the final phase needs some more engineering where the engine used to be and I might try getting rid of the eyeball on the zombie skull and replacing with a more skull-like eye socket. The second phase is also a bit weird – at the moment the whole enemy can take damage but it recharges until the engine is destroyed (so there’s a separate health meter for the engine). This is confusing. I should probably have the main enemy not take damage at this point and only have a health meter for the engine.

The difficulty will need some tweaking but I’ll have to do that in the context of the game more. Generally, I must admit, I am not a big fan of boss fights as they are often done so badly. In my opinion a good boss fight should seem ridiculously tough at first but be relatively straightforward once you’ve worked out a strategy. You shouldn’t die before you’ve even had a chance to get a decent look at the boss and it shouldn’t be a schlep to get there on every retry either. Though I thoroughly enjoyed both Dark Souls and Demon Souls to the point of obsession I found the ‘rinse and repeat’ style run to the bosses immensely tedious. I gave up at the final boss on both games because of this – life was simply too short! The bosses in this game will be optional and protect hefty rewards/upgrades rather than blocking your progress in the game.

I also still need to add some larger explosions befitting an enemy of this size!!

Dev Time: 8 days
Total Dev Time: approx 179 days

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