Bodd the sleeping guard

Now that the time of the Jam it's over and the voting has started I got back in the game and fix/adjust somethings within the game. One touch especially that came out while playing others entries in the jam was the option to play without attacking and having the choiche to simply avoid the conflicts. It wasn't a theme or a requirement for the jam but two games did this and I regret to not have the time to fully complete this in my game.The feature was already there for 90% of the game as you can dodge or parry everything the game throw at you except for Bodd the final boss that can only be slained to proceed afterwards.

This wasn't totally an oversight because making Bodd arena and bossfight was quite long and took me 2 days to complete as it is the most complex entity in the game. I'll show you some of the process and how the Sleeping Orc works!

The game all flows with enemies moving toward the player, this illusion proved itself very useful to control the way the levels and enemies come up into play. It's used in many other shoot em up and it has been easy to make the game this way until to the boss fight.
The problem here came up because I could not predict how long the player would take to bring Bodd down and while creating an infinite corridor and a transition object for when the boss is beaten could have been easy I took another route.

This is the room where you'll find Bodd, he's sleeping when the player fly into the room and can be awekened by player action. If you pay attention on the right side there's an invisible wall that when the player goes over with the ship stop the room speed and get the game locked in place.
Thus the arena is created and the player need to face Bodd to proceed further.

In the image above is shown the code for this trick to work, in the Obj_Global is stored the global variable global.stop wich is used by other object to make the arena work. When the player collide with this invisible wall it set to 1 and the speed of the invisible terrain halt it's speed.

Now that the room stopped Sleeping Bodd will do the same following the global.stop variable and keep sleeping while the player hover around in this locked room with the two headed orc.

As soon as the player interact with the Orc by shooting or hitting with the shield this instance will be destroyed creating another object obj_bodd_wake that will play the waking animation and then destroy itself to create the obj_bodd the fighting form.

From here things gets more complicated as this object will spawn two other obj_joint one for the left arm and for the right that will create the cannons that will stay in place on the hands of Bodd thanks to these joints. Here many other variables as stored as Bodd will move toward the player and when close will orbit around and shoot a wave of projectile by itself.

The joint rest in place to offer an anchor for the cannons wich revealed to be the hardest part of making the boss.

I had a big problem with these because they would not stay around and if fixed at the obj_joint they would not shoot where I wanted them to. So after quite a bit of research I found out that using the function lenghtdir_x and lenghtdir_y I could keep them at a position but that would be changing as the Boss Bodd kept moving around. Basically with this particular code the x and y position of an object can be kept orbiting around a certain position.

The Orkey is summened when Bodd find it self loosing against the player.

The other part that I didn't make in time to develop was then another way to pass this room without snapping Bodd neck that at this point could be beaten only if his health was taken below 0.
I added another way to fight wich is where the player has to attack the weapons of the mighty Bodd and when both destroyed a change of phase would happen where an eyed being appeared attacking the player with laser if taken down it would be tamed by the player and make the room start rolling just as if Bodd was defeated and make through the boss arena.

Thank you for reading and hop on itch.io if you would like to play and rate the game. The voting for the Jam has still 2 weeks before ending!

https://itch.io/jam/retrograde-jam-3/rate/1605846

Have a goodweekend everybody 😁