Another awesome milestone reached this week: all sound effects are in the game!! YES!! I’ll be writing a big ol’ post about my sound designer next week (he’s seriously a genius and has brought so much to the game) but for now you’ll have to make do with this lesser article about a boss I cut a long time ago: the Lil’ Guppy Commander!
You may have seen this picture of him before! He wears a Guppy suit and a big gas tank. He combines the pheromones in the tank with overdramatic arm movements to control swarms of Lil’ Guppies. Here’s some clips of his old fight in action, along with some reasons I didn’t think they were very good. What fun!
He spends most of the fight surrounded by a swarm of Lil’ Guppies, making him difficult to damage. However, all of his attacks make use of the Guppies, leaving him open and allowing you to strike. This one was a reflectable attack, where he’d bunch the Guppies into a ball and use them like a hadouken, but reflecting them didn’t deal direct damage and felt weak (you may as well jump over them and just shoot him while they’re flying around.) He was also made before I implemented the effects for reflectable attacks, which is why he’s missing those.
He’d use the Guppies for lift to perform large jumps, and he’d even throw them at you! He has very few animation frames (and his silhouette is a giant blob) so his movements don’t read well. I checked my notes while writing this blog, and it seems like I also wanted there to be a second phase to the fight, where he was dead but the Guppies were still alive. They’d get new attacks and use his body as a shield, and a projectile. I find that kind of grim humor funny, but it’s pretty dark and doesn’t feel like it belongs in the game.
And, here’s one last attack where he commands a spread-out swarm of Guppies. You can see some are red, which are tougher Guppies that can take more damage. It doesn’t really fit with the purple/yellow visual language of the game and would, I think, cause confusion. You can kinda see him gesture with his hands, showing the direction the swarm will travel in. Again, I wanted big, wacky, Ginyu Force-style movements, but they sadly don’t read too well.
The final nail in the coffin was that there just wasn’t a place for him in the game. He was meant to appear in level 2 (the highway) but that level already has three other bosses, and follows a pretty specific rhythm and structure. Having him in threw everything off and made it feel overlong and bloated, so for the good of the overall game he was removed.
Sooooo there you have it! Sorry for the slightly filler-y post, but next week’s will be really neat, and will at the very least show you all the kinds of detail that can go into game audio when you get a professional on board! Until then!!