Penny takes a deep breath, and looks up at the gigantic door in front of her. Everything she had ever worked for has been building up to the fight she will face behind this door. Behind this door, is her big sister Coppra, the Burrow League Champion!
Hello everyone! It's time to get a sneak peak behind the curtain and look at Mole Maiden’s final boss, Coppra. Coppra was an enormous programing undertaking, so big in fact that I decided to give myself a month to develop all her attacks. So let's get cracking and see just what I’ve cooked up.
Design Goals:
From the very beginning, Coppra was meant to be a cool, flashy, bombastic spectacle that could also really scare the player. Coppra is strong, really strong, and also very creative in the way she attacks the player.
I’ve been drafting this boss in my head for over two years now. The different types of attacks, the tempo at which they play, even which attacks play during the different phases have all been carefully measured to make a fight that I think is tough but fair.
I know that it has definitely taken me a lot of attempts to beat her, but eventually you will learn the patterns to be able to win.
From the very start, Coppra’s fight was created with the following design goals:
- Make a boss who is flashy, and tests the player with everything they have learned so far.
- Make a boss who is fast, and hits like a truck.
- Make a boss with three phases, each with ramping difficulty.
After a month of programming, I think that I have achieved all three of these goals. One play tester came back from fighting Coppra saying “it feels like a balanced fight!” Very comforting words for sure.
Inside the Head of a Champ:
Coppra has three different phases that ramp up in difficulty. Coppra’s fight is a condensed story that showcases a trait about her character that is not know to most players on a first playthrough. Despite Coppra’s friendly and encouraging persona, she does have some anger management issues.
Make her angry enough and she will go full primal hunter on you, earning her the nickname “the Gorilla Combatant.” This increased aggression from Coppra can be seen in the way she attacks the player. While ten different possible attack patterns or actions might seem like a lot at first glance, the complexity stems even deeper as each attack has its own reactionary behavior. What I mean by that is one attack action might behave slightly differently depending on the circumstances the boss is in when they execute the attack. Let's look at Coppra’s jump attack as an example.
This is the sub-FSM for Coppra’s jump attack. Yellow nodes are for actual attack logic, purple is for when the game needs to do any kind of calculations or condition checking, and cyan is for when the game needs to make a decision on something. If you read the path of logic, you will see that when Coppra lands on the ground, the game will check to see which phase she is in before picking which type of burst effect to spawn.
Since phase one is supposed to be very easy, the game will only create one upward burst at the point where Coppra lands, but after phase two starts, this single burst turns into a shockwave that spreads across the entire arena.
Behavioral changes like this are abundant in Coppra’s fight and help emphasize the chaotic nature of the fight. Coppra is after all, losing her composure with every punch that you land, and the sporadic and frantic nature of her attacks help the player feel that emotional shift as the fight goes on. (Plus the changing music for the different phases).
But attacks are not the only thing that changes as the fight goes on, Coppra’s body language and moves also change.
For example, Coppra will not ever make the first move during her fight. Instead she taunts the player, egging them on and forcing them to make the first move. This is actually a reference to the Don Flamenco fight from the NES Punch-Out game, which was a big inspiration for Mole Maiden.
You can also visibly see Coppra get more aggravated as the fight goes on by looking at her four different idle animations in between attacks.
All of these come together to make a boss that I can be really proud of. My goal as a designer is to one day make a boss that achieves that “notoriously difficult” status amongst the internet. Something that can be up there with bosses like 8-Bit Mike Tyson, Sans Undertale, and Melania. While I don’t think Coppra achieves that goal (I think bosses like those should be reserved as optional super bosses) I hope that Coppra’s difficulty at the very least, a challenging and memorable conclusion to your journey in Mole Maiden, and one that makes you look back on the adventure you had to reach this destination.
What’s Next?
The beginning of July also brings with it the beginning of the Mole Maiden Internship program! During the month of July, I will be going back into each of the four Burrow League Captain fights and doing some tuning and code clean-up that uses all the new tools and things I learned from the last couple of months. The interns will be also be getting acquainted with the project's files and will start cracking down on all the polish work to do.
In addition to this, I have some exciting news! Mole Maiden will be at GDEX 2024 at booth A307! We will be showing a brand new demo, a new trailer, and a Launch Date! In addition to this, I am very excited to share that I will be a guest speaker at this year’s event! I will be giving a retrospective on everything I learned from developing Mole Maiden and running an indie studio. So if you are going, I hope to see you there!
Thank you so much for tuning into this update on Mole Maiden’s development! Looking forward to seeing you all in the next one! Till then!