ZOE Begone! News

Having done a bunch of enemies and refined the theme of the game a bit, I decided to tackle the first boss fight!

I decided pretty quickly that I'd need to somehow pause the side scrolling and create some sort of arena in order to contain the fight, mainly because it seemed like it'd be a massive headache to deal with all of the scrolling and warping issues that would come up otherwise, but I also think it was the right call as it mixes up the gameplay style a bit, allowing the player to move more freely around the screen. To contextualise it, I came up with the 'Frame Trap'!



The camera pulls out to reveal the black frame boundaries which also act as walls to keep the player trapped. I was really happy with this as it solved the game design problem and added to and reinforced the context of the game world.

From here it was relatively easy - I came up with a few ideas for the kind of attacks the brush could do and set about implementing them with a spawning system that randomises the order they appear in. There's also a countdown to when the frame trap happens, so the player is able to get into a position where there are some health or energy resources to use during the fight. It's a fairly easy boss to defeat, but there's room to adapt the difficulty in the future when I get around to balancing the difficulty.









Around this time I was also playing with the idea of a mini map at the bottom of the screen which would indicate where health dots are and whether any of the dots had been popped or not (I was planning to make this scroll with the player, so that the green indicator (the player) would stay in the central position and the others move around that), but I ended up scrapping the idea as it was just too much info to be able to read while playing...

Take the fish out one by one and earn points, or dash through them to send them scattering and maybe get a better level clear time bonus?

Most of my time on the project had so far been focused on simply getting things to work and making things look decent, but the player really had no motivation or reason to shoot any of the enemies other than to just, you know, shoot all the enemies. I'm a big Shmup fan, and as such rarely enjoy or pay attention to the story in a Shmup(!), especially one that interrupts the shooting, but this forced me to acknowledge that of course all Shmups have a story or framing narrative of some sort. So it was time to try and figure out mine.

The concept that we were playing with a drawn on film animation had been established, so when the music was put in, I thought it'd be fun to play about with a slow down effect and a camera pull out to reveal the edges of the film when the game was paused.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This test reminded me of something that had always kind of been at the back of my mind, which was to have the 'animator' as the main antagonist, a hand drawing in all the annoying enemies and becoming the boss at the end of each level. I wanted to introduce this idea as soon as possible through the title screen and the context of the menus leading up to the first level, so for a couple of months I focused on the menu design and implementation.

If I wanted this 'animator' to be the baddie, it made sense that we should see the player character relaxing at first before being interrupted or bothered by them.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I was happy that I was finally getting to grips with my camera system at least! The next task was to get the paint brush directly antagonising the character somehow - I'm definitely going to need to revisit this at some point, but I think it gets the idea across well enough for now.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Now that we had the brush vandalising our character's world, it gave the player some motivation to restore it back to it's original peace and tranquility, which helped me finally figure out one of the main mechanics in the game as well - the popping buttons.

When you ground pound the buttons, you see the background transform to it's original colour. The percentage of the background you manage to clean up is tied in to a score multiplier at the end of each level, so there's hopefully an interesting balance to strike between maximising your score and managing your finite energy and health resources (which also come from the buttons).

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Thanks for reading! Next time I'll have a look at the first boss fight with the brush!

I've been getting some more enemies in the bag for level 2 - here's a Thwomp type thing that can take out other enemies if you time it right. Or just hurt you.

Been working on some new enemies recently, this is the level 2 popcorn with slightly over elaborate spawning animation! Still a work in progress.