When looking at boss battle in adventure games, I wanted to stick with a classic RPG type of monster, the Gelatinous Cube. The Gelatinous cube is a creature of little to no intelligence that absorbs anything it comes into contact with making it the perfect kind of monster for a beginning level in an RPG-Adventure type game. This is why I want to make my boss, the King of the Cubes.
I remembered a game I recently played called Rampage Knightsthat had a boss similar to what I'm going to go for. You can see someone's fight with him here:
This boss has a couple of abilities. He spawns minions, pushes the player back toward a pit, and has a ranged and melee attack.
In my game I'd like to focus on mechanics rather than a tank and spank. I plan on approaching the fight with the idea of the player hitting the slime, not doing damage, but multiplying the slime. This will hopefully make them realize (quickly) that merely hitting the boss won't work. To defeat my boss the player will have to destroy columns inside the room that drop on the boss and deal damage. The Columns will be timelined to fall onto a targeted place on the floor. While the player is doing this he would have to deal with harassing minions spawned by the boss and ranged attacks (melee if up close.)
When tasked with an assignment to create a battle arena, I instantly had an idea what do do. The first thing I planned out was the color scheme. I want the environment to be a desert environment so I chose earth/sand tones, and their complements. I can use the complements to draw attention to important set pieces such as the other players spawns. The red tones will be used for my "monster's" flesh color.
Map Design
The design of my map is based off of a gladiatorial arena such as the
Colosseum. Players will start in one of four airships that each have
four cells. The cells will clang open and players will be free to
drive out and fall into the arena. It will be a basic bowl with the
center depressed to it's deepest depths and surrounded by a sandstone
wall to enclose the players. I plan to make the sand run beneath the
player's wheels and deliver a slight pull to the center of the bowl.
Weapon pickups be in front of and re spawn in front of the air ships.
Planned USP's are the center of the bowl exploding open revealing a
hazard in terms of a "Pit Monster" and I'd like to tackle an environment
shift such as a dust bowl style sandstorm. The inspiration behind this monster is a Sarlacc from a little movie called Star Wars.
Map Events
When planning my USPs for this map, I was thinking heavily about how I could introduce the Monster or transform the mechanics of the arena. I planned to have players enter the fight in an epic fashion like gladiators into the Colosseum. They start in a black cell to fanfare and suddenly the cell slams open. The players then drive out of the cell and fall into the arena where they see their opponents for the first time and are introduced to the mechanics of the sand sliding and the minimal amount of pull it has on their navigation. As the battle begins the screen will begin to rumble and there will be rumbling noises. This will intensify in strength and frequency over time as will the increasing strength of the "pull" of the sand. Finally, in the last couple minutes of the map the pit will burst open and the pull from the sand on the arena floor will be at its strongest. Anyone in the center of the map will meet their instant doom and so will anyone else who drives into it after.
I also had ideas to have a Mad Max inspired sand storm roll in and serve to obscure the map, and possibly deal minimal damage. If I can nail the first USP then I will get this in hopefully as well.
I loved this trailer because of how cheesy it is. I haven't played an arcade game since I was a kid, and this trailer caught my attention because of how similar it is to an "As Seen on TV" infomercial. It starts out with a nice close up of Mario's hat M (on his cart) and cranes out to a shot of all the racers down the track. I think this is an effective intro because it focuses and emphasizes that it is a Mario game. The trailer also describes all the new features in the game pretty nicely, the voice over helps alot. The flashy text and "schwing" noise is pretty effective at grabbing your attention, and I imagine it'd be good at drawing peoples attention from across the room in an Arcade.
The Majority of my assets for this semester's Spinout project revolve around my car, the Tesla Model S. This includes the particles I will need to use for my explosive barrel, my weapon particle, my boosters, and my Unique Selling Point (USP). Because of this, I need to come up with a system that will target actors that will work on a weapon and other objects. For my research into a particle, I'm looking into particle behaviors and controlling them to do so. I'd like to make them perform a little something like this:
This script changes weapon firemode and targeting.
In order to achieve what I'm setting out to do, like in the video above, the first thing I need to do is change the default FPS character blueprint. Instead of a single projectile on a trigger pull, it now loops the firing so you can just hold the trigger to fire. I also had to begin scripting the targeting systems for the behavior of the particle hitting random sectors, while polling for pawns to lock on to. When a pawn is found the intended behavior is to stay locked and deal damage while locked. This mechanic is important for my weapon and USP, as the lightning is to deal damage, and is important to my booster because the lightning needs to lock on to give the speed buff in my level.
This is the script for hit/miss
This script controls the behavior of the particle once hits and misses are registered. In theory this should control the erratic behavior of the lightning, and the spawn of locked particles when in range. Once I can get the weapon behaving properly, I can begin to look at moving it to the USP and Boosters.
In programming my USP I wanted to have the large Tesla coil activate by a lever on the opposite side of the map. This would potentially let someone behind or ahead trigger the coil and roast the competition. In order to do this, I had to create a Boolean for a lever being pulled, but to keep it balanced, I decided to add delays to effectively give the activation a "cooldown."
Once I got the weapon working in a single player environment I transferred it into the Spinout project and began to set it up to work on my vehicles weapon and USP (unique selling point). The weapon version was an easy transfer as I just had to create new bones and sphere collisions for my particle to generate from.
The Giant Tesla USP was a bit trickier. Once I got the lever scripted to activate the coil, the map was almost too dormant. TO fix this I broke off the erratic behavior of the particle, threw a random delay on it, and set it to activate permanently. This gives the level a nice ambient random lightning discharge.
I basically changed up my exploding barrel from what it was (the Tesla Coil) to an Edison light bulb. I have the scripting down for light hits to make it spark and heavy hits to instantly detonate, but I'm having issues figuring out how to make the glass on the bulb shatter pre explosion. I also plan to add zapping electricity sounds and particle effects rather than the fiery explosion placeholders that are there now.
