So, this is sort of a continuation of last week's develop. I've begun to make some major progress for the game's big boss. Animations have been added for different attacks. Honestly, animations have been pretty easy now that it's all rigged. I can't believe I considered animating this beast without rigging it initially. Goodness that would be a nightmare. The animations are as easy as they are fun to make. I try to make an effort to make every part of the boss's body move with each animation, so it feels as fluid as possible. I'd love to show some of its progress, but as of now I'm neglecting to show a lot of details of the game's boss until the game gets released. I can give some info, though. It was initially inspired from Kraid in Super Metroid, and the boss's size clearly reflects that. It's so tall that you can't see the entire thing at once. Its head is above the screen, so you have to get to a higher point inn the room to see it. Because of this, I gave the boss two different categories of attack. One for when you're at its eye level, and another for when you're not. When you're not at eye level and are near its legs, it'll do different attacks related to them, such as stomping and kicking. When you're at eye level, it will do things such as shoot projectiles from its mouth, and try to swipe at you with its arms.

While I said I won't show the boss itself, below is a silhouette of it to give you a vague idea of what it is.

I don't have a ton of attacks for it right now, but I do have functionality for it cycling through the attacks and using them depending on where you are. So if you're at ground level, it would cycle through different attacks with its legs, but if you're higher up, it'll do attacks with its mouth, or arms. With that implemented, adding more attacks will be easy in terms of giving it functionality in the fight.

I was also struggling with how to come up with a good way to fight the boss. I have a way for you to actually stun it, but given the boss's design, I wasn't sure how to implement a way for you yourself to attack it while it's stunned, especially with your measly pickaxe. However, I was able to figure something out. Again, I don't wanna give too much info, but what I plan to do is to have it so that when it is stunned, certain parts of its body will become weakened and flash red, while it's flashing red, you can go over to it and start whacking at it with your pickaxe to deal damage to the boss.

In addition to the boss fight itself, I've also recently started working on a boss theme. I've been using Famitracker to compose tracks for this game, so I decided to use that. There was a program called FamiStudio that I was gonna use since it's more designed like a DAW versus a tracker, but given that it's still in development and is missing some key features that Famitracker has, I decided to not use it. Chiptune is still something I'm learning, but since a lot of this project has been done solely by me, I wanna also do most of the music. It's been difficult though, especially with making good instruments for Chiptune. I originally used Milky Tracker, but I found it very difficult to make good sounding instruments that weren't hard on the ears, so I switched to Famitracker since it poses the limitations of the NES on you, so it's a bit easier to make an instrument since it has preset waveforms for you to use.

Anyways, given the secretive nature of this boss, and since it's been the majority of what I've been working on for Lost Caves lately, this is gonna be a rather short devlog. When I start working on other bits of functionality and additions to the game, however, these should become more long-form like they have in the past.