Patreon Weekly #30 - Dec 28th, 2019

Hey Patrons!

I hope you're all having a happy holiday! Work this week has been a bit slow for obvious reasons, but I am still making very good progress towards a redesigned DM-300 boss fight!

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Spritework:

For 0.8.0-beta-3.0 my plan is to include all of the spritework up to and including the caves, in either final or close to final form. This means new sprites for all the DMs and unique visuals for DM-300's arena.

As usual please keep in mind that these sprites are unfinished, but you should be able to get the idea of where I'm going with them. I'm fairly happy with the body shape of DM-100s and Pylons, but the body for DM-200s is basically a placeholder, and DM-300 is still largely unchanged.

For the DMs, I want to try to display a clear progression of technology and size leading up to DM-300. DM-100s are smaller creatures with spider-like limbs, and are clearly designed with mobility in mind. The DM-200 has a much bulkier frame and smaller triangular treads. DM-300, of course, more resembles a tank. While I am making changes to DM-300's sprite I want to keep the general shape quite similar as it's so iconic. Primarily I want to see how big I can get away with DM-300 being, I'm sure it can be at least a bit larger. I'm also quite happy with how well two sets of treads works, as it gives some nice visual depth to the sprites. Lastly, that sprite on the right is a power pylon (more on those in a minute), which are made to resemble a Tesla coil.

As for DM-300's arena, there are a bunch of new unique visuals! The arena is a large circular shape with some semi-random tunnels at the center and corners. Exposed wiring litters the floor, taking the place of the old expired traps. At the top there is a big metal gate which blocks access to a bridge leading to the dwarven metropolis. Each corner of the arena hides a power pylon.

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Boss Mechanics:

All the mechanics for the DM-300 fight (covered in weekly #28) are now implemented and working individually. This includes redesigned versions of its old abilities (toxic gas, falling rocks, and healing on traps), and new abilities which work around a 'supercharged' state. I really like how the design of these abilities play into eachother, as DM forces the player to keep moving, while simultaneously having terrain play a bigger part in the fight. When not enraged, DM will gain a shield if it steps onto a metal tile (this replaces the previous trap mechanic), and those same tiles will instead shock the player when DM-300 is  supercharged. 

DM becomes supercharged at 2/3 and 1/3 health, and can only be knocked out of this state by destroying a specific power pylon that becomes active. There are some pretty large environmental tells as to which pylon is powered, so there isn't any guessing necessary there, but actually reaching and destroying these pylon is complicated by DM-300 being invincible, having 2x speed, and gaining the ability to dig! The digging mechanic works really well, It's genuinely unnerving to hide in a tunnel and see the earth break apart just a few tiles away as DM-300 steadily approaches you. The active pylon itself also adds a bit of a wrinkle to things, by shocking adjacent tiles in a clockwise pattern.

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Now that all of the individual parts of the DM-300 fight are functional, I hope to get everything working together and balanced next week, so that beta-3.0 can release very early in the new year. While I am very happy with the DM-300 changes I'm probably going to scale things back in scope a bit for the DK and Yog improvements, so that I can get 0.8.0 finished in January.