Bones, FCT and some weapons

We’ve started working on the development of the first boss of the game: Bones. Graphics-wise, it’s taking far longer than we anticipated. The main problem is that we’re trying to make humongous bosses and that adds a TON of work since we have to do the whole thing in high definition pixel art.

The fun part is that Bones isn’t by any means the largest boss in the game. In fact he’s rather small since we have to cram him inside the monorail in that particular level, so we really can’t even imagine the trouble we’re going to be in when we have to draw bosses three times the size. Fun times ahead indeed.

At first we gave it a shot with Spine, but when rotating his body parts (not that he has many, we chopped the poor sucker’s legs off) the pixels ended up a bit off, so we had to fix the whole thing frame by frame. Total nightmare.

All the bosses will have about two or three special attacks in addition to a basic one, with visual tells to let the player know when he’s going to get smashed by a deadly combo so he can try to avoid it.

When things get hairy, it’s going to be difficult to keep track of the damage dealt and received, so we’ve devised a Floating Combat Text (FTC) system that shows how much damage each weapon is dealing.

Critical hits will do additional damage depending on the weapon and its upgrades (we’ll talk about that further on), and the FCT will reflect that with bigger numbers.

We also want to incorporate notifications triggered by type of enemy death. We’d like to add loads of different ways your enemies can perish.

Drawing inspiration from Quake II and Terminator II, we’ve given unholy birth to a deadly gatling gun. It’s big. It’s ugly. It overheats. But when it gets spinning, it will decimate everything in sight short of a planet. It’s an ideal weapon to face either hordes of multiple enemies, or the toughest bosses in the game, so the ammo will be understandably scarce.

To keep its power in check, and in addition to the ammo scarcity, we’re using an overheating mechanic so you can’t just keep blasting away until the end of time. When the gun heats up, there will be a cooldown period where it becomes unusable. As soon as the cooldown is over, the massacre can continue!

Hell, it’s about time. It’s here, finally…the almighty Shotgun. What’s a shooter without a shotgun? I mean, come on! Here it is!

The Shotgun is the traditional close quarters killer. The nearer you are to the target, the deadlier it gets, but if you stray too far…well, everyone knows what happens. It’s going to be one of the main weapons to dispose of hordes of weak enemies in a quick and efficient manner. Just try and be as close as possible to them when you pull the trigger.

We really like to geek out and shove as many references and homages as we can in Chosen. There’s already a few of them in the game in hopes of being discovered some day when the game is done, but we’re going to share the last one we’ve included. We’re fairly certain some of you already know what the whole thing’s about from the section title.

Last week will be remembered in the history books as the week when George R.R. Martin slaughtered the somewhat thick but lovable Hodor in front of millions of people, sentencing him to live in an infinite time loop of dragging around a cripple kid and yapping “hodor” until the end of time.