Boss Spears
I wanted to take this week's ligher content update to talk about one of the strategies we are taking for bosses in QuiVr: Spears.
One of the issues that many games can suffer from are "bullet sponges". I have tried to prevent this from happening in QuiVr (aside from the Laser enemy which isn't really intended to be killed) by using more enemies as opposed to enemies with more health. However bosses present a problem in that there is only one enemy, and it can't die too quickly or it won't be very fun. The last thing I want to do is require you to shoot a hundred arrows into a boss to kill it.
Luckily a strategy already exists to get around this: Weak Points. The worm has them built into its body, and they activate at certain points during a fight. However this can cause issues with many bosses where it might not be clear where the weak points are, particularly for more complicated or detailed bosses. So (with inspiration from Sundered) we wanted to create a universal weak-point system that can be shared among all the bosses.
These Spears can be embedded in any enemy, leading to any number of weak points without needing to update the 3D model. They inherently stand out from the bosses in silhouette and texture. And they can be easily learned during the first boss fight that uses them, knowledge that then transfers to all other bosses! There are some other benefits too such as moving and scaling them for difficulty adjustment, and keeping all the different creature models grounded to the QuiVr universe by a common physical trait.
Overall I think that this weak point system will be a great benefit for the Event Tiles. Both providing an escape from bullet sponge mechanics as well as an intuitive progress indicator without a health bar.
New Boss Progress
Work has continued on the new Boss event, I think it looks really awesome with all the animations, but I want to take enough time to make the event feel completely different from the Worm boss (where I used one of the most versatile mechanics of throwing rocks at teleporters).
I think the results will be worth the wait, and remember to jump into the beta branch in the coming days if you want a sneak peek before release into the main branch. I will announce on discord when the new boss is available for testing.
Other Changes and Fixes
- Added more visible trail for thrown rocks in Worm event
- Small thrown rocks now have a brighter outline
- Added new system for event sequence to prevent duplicates before all are used
- Map seed updated