The BitBull Blog

I’m pretty resigned to the fact that these bosses are going to take me ages now, and the fact that I’ve finally come to this realisation weirdly makes the process of creating them considerably easier to deal with. Also I think I’ve made all the edits that the code needs to cope with enemies with multiple ‘hit spots’ and the like so I’m no longer having to go back and rework old code, this alone makes the process considerably less frustrating.

So, whilst this one took me knocking on six days and was still really hard work it felt like the easiest of the lot. I think a large contributing factor to this was the fact that the art came together really quickly (I was done in just over a day) and I feel much more in my comfort zone when I’m coding rather than pushing pixels.

I based the spider’s head and abdomen on ‘real’ reference material, though I also referenced much more stylised representations. I took the layout and proportion of the legs from a robot spider image I found somewhere on the net but changed the look and feel completely to fit in with the overall game style.

Animating the legs, mandibles and abdomen was done in code. This wasn’t difficult but was extremely time consuming as there’s so many moving parts (24 leg sections) which, as MonoGame is pretty ‘raw’, all have to be lined up and connected manually by working out pixel grid references and such. This is a pain in the arse – I guess engines like Unity and Unreal have ‘drag and drop’ tools that make this type of process much easier but generally I don’t like the bloat and overhead that comes with those types of tools and prefer the fact that MonoGame is pretty low level.

I’m calling this enemy the ‘spinner’ and it has three attack phases…

Stage One
In this stage the spinner is attached by a web strand to the top of the screen. It tracks the player very fast horizontally when in its ‘retracted’ state or attempts to divebomb the player when the player moves beneath it. This is the only way to get it to expose it’s fleshy, pulsating abdomen which must be destroyed in order to move to the next stage. When it hits the ground after a divebomb attack it spits out a burst of fireballs.

Stage Two
With its abdomen destroyed the spinner detaches from its web and begins to chase the player very aggressively. At regular intervals it will fire off bursts of a triple laser beam. In order to move to the next stage the player must shoot off all of its legs – its head and body are invulnerable until this happens.

Stage Three
Now legless, the spinner alternates between a mad spin attack in which it fires off a single laser at increasing speed, and a kamikaze style attack where it attempts to ram the player (its mandibles do a lot of damage). All of its body parts are now vulnerable to attack.

Generally I’m really pleased with this boss. There’s still something about the ‘lightbulb’ on its abdomen in stages two and three I’m not sure about so I may rework this but generally I think all the attacks are working pretty well, just need to be balanced in-game properly. I even had some time to add some custom audio for the lasers and fireballs, still need to go back and add this for the other bosses.

And I still need to add boss-sized bones and explosions!

Dev Time: 6 days
Total Dev Time: approx 185 days

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