Alright! The new year is underway and I’ll probably be back to shorter, more concise entries for the time being.

This week I worked on the third level of the game, including touching up one of the bosses of said level! I’ve shown this picture of her a few times, but here is Red:

When I design bosses, I typically start with a unique mechanic for the boss to have. In this case, I wanted the boss’s attacks to be easy and straightforward, but for her to be fought among a constant swarm of enemies, so the player has to divide their attention and fend off attacks from all sides.

My first stab at the swarm of birds was simple — I was mainly focused on making the swarm look organic and random. There’s some little touches on the birds like random animations, differences in speed, and subtle movements that hopefully make them look interesting and natural.

This is how I left it months ago when I originally worked on the boss, but when I came back to it I felt it needed work. The screen looks busy, but the birds only take one hit to die. All you have to do is shoot the few birds that pose an actual threat to you and let the rest go on their way.

I tried to mix it up by altering the behaviour of the bird swarm:

Once they fly too far to the right, they circle back to try and hit you — so every bird now has the potential to be a threat, and you have to be a lot more aware of them and active about taking them out. This is a step up in difficulty from the previous version, so I may thin out their numbers a bit when using this style of swarm.

That was pretty cool, but they still all enter from the same side of the screen. If you spray and pray to the left and you’ll kill most of the birds before they even enter the screen… so I tried one more variant to see how it would work:

Now they come from all over the place, and lightly home in on you from the very beginning! I tried to balance that by having them not enter the screen in a straight line, but curving in from the outside instead. I may have to make the curve more gentle… I don’t want for them to unfairly hit a player before they have a chance to be seen. Anyways, it’s way more frantic and best captures what I had in mind when I was thinking up the boss.

The best part of this process is that I kept the code for all three swarm behaviours, which gives me a lot of freedom when it comes time to balance the game! I really enjoy when bosses gain different behaviours depending on the game’s settings… in my case, like here, I tend to design a bit too much and then scale things back — and the harder attacks just get saved for harder difficulties!