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!!
#bossgame
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.
Bossgame got a super nice review in gaming magazine JV!! 💜
I can't read French well, but I more or less get the gist of it... it's such a kind writeup 😭 Honestly, holding a print magazine with my game inside is kind of hard to wrap my head around............... losing it a little
Ahh!! I have an English translation for the article, thanks to @TheBlondeBass!! 💜
*20 mobile games to brighten your summer *
BOSSGAME: THE BOSS IS MY HEART
Like its name more or less implies, Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is a boss rush in which we wage battle after battle. Often being some of the most memorable moments in games, boss fights have become their own genre all about creative reinvention of gameplay. This is exactly what Bossgame accomplishes, while also telling a worthwhile story between battles.
In this 2D pixel art game, we follow a lesbian couple, Sophie and Anna, a priestess and a witch who hunt demons for the church of Mammon. Intersected by well-written dialogue where the two lovers talk about their relationship and question their work, the game offers a succession of bosses, who also wear their hearts on their sleeves (and being very entertaining all-around).
These varied fights are played by holding your phone sideways, and using each thumb to control Sophie and Anna. In action, the game plays almost like a rhythm game, where you must alternate between short and long presses, and between attack and defense "buttons". Fights in Bossgame ask for careful stamina management and pattern memorization, well-established concepts that nonetheless feel like a brilliant pair with the game's controls. As a whole, Lily Valeen's game has a refreshing feel to it, not unlike its love story filled with humor and charm.
I don't know what else to say, it's just really really lovely!! Jeez...
Bossgame got a super nice review in gaming magazine JV!! 💜
I can't read French well, but I more or less get the gist of it... it's such a kind writeup 😭 Honestly, holding a print magazine with my game inside is kind of hard to wrap my head around............... losing it a little