Welcome to summer time!! It has...admittedly been summer for a while now. It's really hot out. Vancouver had a pretty nasty heat wave! It's coming back for round two...... I am trying my best to remain cool and not-stinky but it's a challenge.
But enough about the weather. Let's talk about ANOTHEREAL!
I hit a really fun milestone this week... Chapter 1 is now officially 100% gameplay complete!
What does this mean? Well...you can play the game from the start & be able to 'beat' Chapter 1. Not all the polish is there. There's a bunch of missing music & SFX. But the content? Oh baby.
One of the most fun parts of all this is that I managed to script up & implement the first chapter boss encounter. It's pretty complex (and possibly too difficult...) This is where all the pieces come together. Normal enemy encounters provide tiny tests of skill, but they're all building knowledge & reflexes for the boss encounters... And this first one will be a really interesting challenge to playtest & tune. Right now, I have it split up into checkpoints due to its challenge, and I have been able to beat it myself...but there's accessibility resources to help out if it's too much!! I'm tuning the difficulty to be doable by myself to start, and I can foresee tweaking it even more as I get more people in there to give it a shot.
One thing that had to be given special attention was the way in which boss encounters are integrated into the story: how you succeed, fail, and retry.
When you encounter a normal enemy, the game takes a moment to sweep you away to a battle screen, present you a challenge, and then regardless of if you succeed or fail, it returns you to where you were in the world. If you win, the enemy's gone. If you lose, they're still there. I don't have a concept of a normal enemy "game over" because the presence of enemies specifically blocks your way, but kicking you out to a game over is a bit silly when you don't have a persistent health stat.
For a boss encounter though, these are extremely tied to the narrative experience... More often than not, a big chapter boss will be called up by a story cutscene and given a greater cinematic presence. When you win, the story continues...
When you fail a story boss, I needed to take into consideration whether it has a concept of a "Game Over" screen... But, again, I don't like the interruption and negative feedback that telling a player they failed gives.
SO! I came up with a compromise: When you fail a big chapter boss, you're presented with a screen telling you to not give up, and then an option: Return to the title screen (if you need a break, which is reasonable!), or continue to EXIST and return to the fight either from the start or from your latest checkpoint (in the case of a multi-phase encounter)... This way, the boss encounter is always presented to you in the form of a story gate. And once you pass it, the story continues.
It's always a challenge to figure out what "difficulty" means for a game. When you can't "lose" from a normal fight, what is preventing you from just running through things without a challenge? Well, boss fights give you those gates... And I'm sure there will be a lot to figure out to balance it all. But all the pieces are in place to throw it in front of someone and see how it plays. So I'm excited to do that!
And Chapter 2 development awaits... Astra's adventures will continue to head into the city itself, so look forward to a bit of work in progress once development is far enough to share a bit of it. There's so many things I've been sitting on until I finished the big finale of Chapter 1... The boss and story sequences are very plot heavy, so I won't share anything from them specifically until the game is closer to playable. But!!! New stuff to come that isn't as tied to spoiler stuff will be fair game, so please look forward to it~
See you in the next update!
