I spent this week working more on the boss fight. It’s done! Sort of…

Checklist

  • Evil Island changes:
    • fix ballistics on boss fight
    • add a second phase to the fight
    • add minions to the fight
  • playtested the boss fight a bunch… and it’s too hard

Fixed Ballistics

Last week I was super proud of my ballistics calculations, and then I discovered that they were still off for some reason.

To cut to the chase, though, “some reason” was that my mortars are only half-affected by gravity – they fall at half the acceleration of everything else. I don’t remember why but I guess I decided I wanted the mortars to feel more floaty at some point. I didn’t want to break all the places I had placed mortar cannons in the past so I just halved gravity in my ballistics calculations and it now works great! Every few seconds the CEO of Evil Corp lobs a spread of three explosive mortars right at you.

Second Phase and Minions

A screenshot of Escape from Evil Island. It shows the player standing on a platform over a pool of lava and a sign that says EVIL CORP. A few zombies are marching around the lava pool. The CEO of Evil Corp, in his Evil Flying Machine, is to the right of the player. A group of three mortars are falling in from the top of the screen.

It wouldn’t be a boss fight without a second phase, of course. The second part is really almost more straightforward than the first – once you’ve destroyed the batteries powering his shield, he starts moving in a pattern, and you are now free to shoot him directly. Apply enough bullets, and he explodes! Game over! (Currently you just get sent straight back to the main menu.)

Some parts of the fight also felt a little empty, since he’s not actually able to lob his mortars at you everywhere in the level. Thankfully, I’ve already established monster spawners within the game, so he’s got some friends in the form of an infinite drip feed of zombies and flying drones strategically position around the arena.

Playtesting

So I’ve been playing it too! It all functions great… but it’s too hard. Very hard games have their place, but Escape from Evil Island has not been an incredibly difficult game up to this point and I absolutely don’t want a huge difficulty cliff right at the final boss. (And yes, I cheated to get the screenshot up above more easily.)

Thankfully I’ve got several knobs I can tweak to tune the difficulty a bit, and I’ve already found a few things that make it feel just as hectic but a little less impossible. I’m sure with some more tweaking I’ll be able to dial things in to be satisfying but not frustrating, I hope!

Next Week

For now, I’m going to let the boss fight rest, and I’ll come back to it with a fresh pair of eyes in a bit. Which means, I have one level left to build: the first one. I know there’s some art I’ll need to add for it, and one small extension to some existing functionality, but overall it shouldn’t be a huge amount of work.