Happy Monday, everyone and welcome to another Progress Update.
Progress on Rogue Lives was hindered by the heavy rain in the area and a few other things causing changes in my schedule but I still made a decent amount of progress. Most of the work was put towards adding in one or more placeholder minibosses to get the concept working within level generation and then making it work within the levels themselves.
First, creating the minibosses. Before last week’s update, I had already selected a few sets of sprites from my list of assets to use so I proceeded to create a basic miniboss fight using them. The sprites I picked had an elemental theme like they could just pop into existence and then out using whichever element they were composed of.
Because of that, I decided to have them move around by teleporting which started and ended with them fading out. When I’ve done something like this before, I’ve written the code for every object type that uses this. This time, I decided to create a class that handles the fading of a sprite using the Sprite Renderer. It’s so simple I can’t believe I never thought of doing this before. I’ve already added it to the treasure chest prefab which I think gives it a much more magical feeling.
With that complete, I also had to create the basic attack pattern of the minibosses. Currently, this is:
- Teleport In
- Wait A Bit
- Fire A Projectile
- Wait Another Bit
- Teleport Away
I like this as a basic patter but I want to update it in the future. I’d like to give each of the elementals some kind of special features like fire leaving behind a trail that damages the player if they touch it. That will probably have to wait as I iron out a few more things I need done before GDC.
Finally, I started adjusting level generation to account of the addition of the miniboss room. I’ve experimented with adjusting the size of the dungeon and the distance between the entrance, the boss room and the miniboss room. Currently, the miniboss room can be anywhere that is at least two rooms away from the boss room and the same amount away from the entrance. Right now, it generally means that it’s in the middle room of the path. Like with the miniboss actions, I intend to update it at a later date but it may have to wait until after GDC. At the moment, I’m prioritizing getting the basics up and running and adding more enemies for a bit of variety.
Well, that’s it for this week’s progress update. I hope you’ll be back next week.
J.D. Kelly 