It's coming closer...
...and there will be no escape.
...because it's a boss. You can't escape from a boss. It's a rule!
Anyway, welcome to another CrossCode Update!
Dat boss, srsly
We have been making a lot of progress towards our first real boss fight, though there is still plenty of work to be done.
That's because this boss is not just like any other enemy. It's complex. It pushes the engine to entirely new levels.
Well, to be precise: the boss will be composed out of several entities.
The goal here is to model a larger creature whose shape can't be properly abstracted with a simple bounding box (the common shape of entities).
So instead, we put several entities together, e.g. one entity for the leg, another for the torso and so on.
Of course that means we'll have to move and animated these entities in sync.
That's what I've been implementing last week. Here is a screenshot of a test enemy based on the new technique:
This enemy is composed out of 3 entities. That's kinda hard to see from this screenshot, so here's another one, where Lea is standing on top of that... thing:
(I also apologize for coming up with such disturbing test graphics)
The work isn't done with implementing this entity synchronization, though. We still need to have a way to create animations for these kind of multi-entity thingies. And no, you really don't want to put together and animate several sprites by manually editing JSON assets. So yes, Felix started working on an editor for that. And that's... kind of a long term project. Here's a screenshot from the current state:
So, that's not quite finished yet. But our goal is to complete it until the CrossWeek we plan to have soon (more on that later).
So, apart from all the technical stuff, we also got first graphics for the boss by T-Free. You can see them at the top of this post. Yep, that's all for now. :P
Skill Menu, graphics, music, and DUNGEONS
Apart from all the boss related efforts, work continuous on several others ends as well. I worked on the circuit menu and is close to finishing the circuit overview.
Martina made progress with the the map graphics of the new area (we'll probably have a first preview ready for the next update). And then, Intero is back composing awesome music for us! Not only did he work on a new theme for the cargo ship, he also composed a new type of battle theme. In fact, you can listen to a preview here:
Link: Soundcloud.com
Kind of an unexpected turn from the other battle themes, right? We'd be happy to hear your opinion!
Finally, we had a very productive planning session this week. We did some brainstorming and collected several ideas for puzzles, enemies and the general graphical design of the first dungeons of the game! We push the planning of the dungeons, since we plan include them in our next milestone.
Milestone and CrossWeek
Apropos milestone. The current milestone is for spring which is... now. But we're not quite ready yet. So we set the final deadline for our milestone to 20th April.
And also, we'll be having our CrossWeek from 14th to 20th of April!
CrossWeek means, we'll meet up together at one place and work on CrossCode, full-time, for one week.
That should be sufficient to finish that milestone once and for all!
And that's all for this update! Stay tuned for the next update. Who knows, maybe you'll see more of that mysterious boss enemy.
Until then!
Cool!