Short Giraffe Blog Post 3: Bosses!

This week I ended up doing a spike for the sprint to explore and test the viability of fightable boss like enemies within the game. My job was to make a vertical and horizontal based boss battles and see if our character controller could handle the more intense action required for the system. In the horizontal boss battle I created a simple scene where there are branches above the player to swing on set between two walls. In this space the boss entity would dash towards the direction of the player. To avoid the boss, the player has to grab onto a branch above them and pull themselves up. While above the boss the player has to bait the boss into hitting one of the two walls in order to stun it. Upon being stunned the boss becomes vulnerable from attacks from above which is when the player smacks down onto the boss, damaging it. This style of encounter plays to the strengths of Short Giraffes mechanics with the player having to use their timing and strategy to successfully take down these creatures.

A vertical boss battle was also created where the player must constantly avoid an ever-climbing floor. This quickly became more of a level design problem then a mechanical viability problem but it did let us know that vertical encounters will need to be more carefully thought out in order to deliver the experience we are looking for.

Since Short Giraffe is not a combat focused game, the strategy we are employing for how we will tackle these encounters is to make the focus of the fight on the players ability to control Agent G in various desired ways under the pressure of imminent threat. The player will have limited health before having to restart the encounter. We think this will greatly increase the amount of creativity we can inject into the world and diversify the gameplay from being strictly platforming.