A blink and you'll miss it moment in Bossgame is Anna's outbursts towards Donovan when he refuses to pay her and Sophie that are (unjustly) removed after being on screen for only a second. But it's some good shit and people deserve to see the wrath of a lesbian scorned!

For currently secret reasons my partner Beau (carnivalien on 🐦📷) went back to these two and gave them shading! So enjoy our renditions of Chibi Sophie and Anna with more details! Aren't they adorable? And check out carnivalien too! Plus IvaTheHuman who did the original art the chibis are based on!

I was on a podcast!! I had a ton of fun chatting with Sebastion on The Single Player Experience ✨ we talked about Bossgame, mobile games, RPGs, and bullying my girlfriend into dating Chie in P4 😈

you should check it out!!

indie game dev is just about cheating, always, all the time, whenever it saves you a headache. just constantly doing the most illegal stuff. wacko art styles, hacky one-off scripts, doors that are also tables that are also clouds... games combine 15+ creative disciplines into a single medium and you do not have enough lifespan to do things with propriety

ok ok ok, i thought of a good example of this i ran into recently!!

There's a certain boss fight in Bossgame that has a lot of story beats within the fight, like big plot points are happening, it's a climax of the story, everything is very important. this is pretty much the only fight in the game like this, every other mid-fight conversation is very minimal - characters only speak in one-sentence popups and yell short "battle quotes"

So basically i had NO way of portraying a complex plot mid-battle. I thought about possibly changing scenes to the standard "phone text cutscene" but that code would be a pain and it'd kill the pace. I thought about just doing dozens of the one-sentence popups, but that would take ages and wouldn't have the dramatic feel i was hoping for

SO, what i did: after beating phase 1, i made the boss spawn an empty object, which had a script that would spawn other objects on a timer. Then i had the boss pause its AI for ~55 seconds. the controller object spawns a giant solid black plane to hide the battle, and a bunch of image & text objects play directly over top the battle. the whole cutscene is all just weird one-off objects spawning over each other in sequence.

From there, i just winged the rest. Like, i couldn't really figure out how to convey who was speaking at first, until i realized I could just make massively size up the 48px character heads. i made everything slide around a bit for dynamism and damn, it just... came together. the cutscene is surprisingly complex for me just spawning things over top a battle (i think you can even still press character buttons during it...)

programming a battle cutscene manager would have been a pain to do for a single battle, so i just slapped it all together with gum and it worked!! in fact, i think the limitations inspired me to try some creative workarounds and helped me come up with ideas!! basically, sometimes hacking is great.