Where we are with development, and other general stuff

Well, after four months of developing we have finally reached the development of the final boss level within the game, and you have no idea how happy I am. Last night I finished the implementation of the final boss, Nexrolis. In this post I'm just going to go over how the boss works, and show some pictures.

So, if you don't already know, the game we are working on is Floors of Discomfort. It is a roguelike dungeon crawler with a bit of platforming. The way the game works is that there are five levels leading up to a final boss fight. Throughout each level you have to collect coins then find a key that will allow you to advance to the next floor. Each floor has it's own theme and level of difficulty.

The sixth level is where the boss resides. He will be the final fight in the game and will result in beating the game if he is defeated. Nexrolis, as he is called,  has a three stage attack. He first executes his melee attack, a quick stab. If the play is close enough he will be dealt 10 damage.

Below is a picture of the stab:

Nothing too fancy about it, just a basic stab animation. Soon after though, he conducts his range attack, quite a bit more devastating than the previous attack. With this attack, Nexrolis casts a shadow skull at the player. The skull moves rather slow, but if it collides with the player it will deal it will deal 30 damage.

Below is a picture of the skull animation:

Nexrolis' final attack is the fire rain. The attack is pretty self explanatory,  he causes fire to rain from the sky. It is his most devastating attack, and hard to avoid, but it is possible. The goal in creating this game was to make it very hard, but possible to beat. When you die you should feel as though it was a mistake on your part, and not the game being unfair. Anyway, below is a picture of the final attack.

The animations are very smooth, and everything for the most part is working. There are still some things that need touching up, but I am very pleased with how everything came out.

Nexrolis isn't going to have a health bar, and there is no pushback when he is hit so we are going to have to figure out a system for giving the player some indication that he hurt Nexrolis because if not the boss fight won't feel right. Other than that, things are going well.


Looking forward there is still a lot to do, but not so much gameplay anymore, development is starting to move toward aesthetics now. The entire game needs to be scaled up because the scale is too small, that is going to be a project. A pause menu has to be implemented, an options menu, the backgrounds need to be animated. The core gameplay, however, is done and that is a huge milestone.

All in all things are progressing quite nicely. We are going to start work on the cutscenes and making the game look awesome and then it will be time for release! Things are moving very quickly, it's hard to believe that only a few months ago this game consisted of a bunch of squares moving around the screen... it's crazy.