This week I started tackling the second level! Environment art was touched up and put in the game, as were most of the minor enemies for this level. But I don’t want to focus on those so much this week, because I also spent a great deal of time re-doing the Kitty Chopper boss!

This is it! The Kittehs from Bleed have managed to fix up the Chopper Core, and they’re out for revenge. It’s too bad they can barely fly it…! Like the boss I mentioned a few weeks ago, the Kitty Chopper was one of the first bosses I made for Bleed 2, and it really showed… its attack patterns were just kind of meh and it had a distinct lack of polish and personality. So rather than polishing a turd trying to make the existing version better, I scrapped the whole thing and started over, documenting bits of the process!

First I redesigned the visuals a bit. The Kitty Chopper attacks primarily with small and large missiles, neither of which you could see on the original model — they’d just kind of appear from nowhere. Now the minigun is moved back so you can see the missile bay, and the large missile can be lowered from inside the chopper.

Also, by the way, those are final-product images. The chopper is actually composed of a bunch parts, allowing different areas to animate independently. Here’s a selection of the chopper’s sprite sheet showing some of the different pieces. You can see where I’ve marked the boundaries of each sprite, plus their hitboxes in some cases.

(Warning, lots of .gifs upcoming. I optimized them as best I could!)

The first thing I did was put the final visual product together in code, testing out all the various visual features I had planned, making sure they remained intact even when moved and rotated.

Then I set up the chopper’s hitboxes, also making sure they worked fine with movement and rotation. You may notice the tail has no hitboxes — it did in the former version of the boss, but since you always fight the Kitty Chopper while in front of it, the hitboxes weren’t needed and actually made one attack a bit harder to dodge.

Then I got its movements and basic behaviours down.

By movements, I mean how you can see it wobbling and wiggling through the air — the whole idea is that the Kittehs are having a rough time controlling the chopper. The former version of the boss moved very smoothly and machine like, it was artificial feeling and didn’t nearly convey that any trouble was being had behind the wheel.

By behaviours, I mean like the missile firing. Using everything I’ve set up so far, I can make a simple ‘fire missile’ command that spawns a missile at the appropriate position and rotation of the chopper’s missile bay. Additionally, it moves the chopper’s missile graphic in a way that makes it appear as though another missile is being loaded from within. Once that ‘fire missile’ command is set up and working, I can use it any time a missile is fired and it’ll be guaranteed to work exactly how I expect.

Now I started using everything I’d developed to make the chopper’s attack patterns! Old version on the left with the boring smooth movement and the boring pew pew pew attack pattern. You can kind of see how the missiles just magically appear on the old version, I think it looks pretty lame. You might also notice the new version keeps a bit more distance from the raised platform — I thought the older version felt claustrophobic and gave you less time to react.

Another attack re-done. Previously the minigun attack was just a sweep, and you’d have to dodge through the gaps in the bullets (or just air-dash really high.) I dunno, I just thought it was, again, boring and machine-like. The new attack tracks your movements and has a variation to the bullets, forcing you to be more conscious of the attack and move around more. The minigun also animates now, woo!

And in some cases I added whole new attacks, or whole new parts to them. The old version of this attack just moved in a straight line at you and then back. Yawwwwn. The new version always rushes across at a fixed height, but transitions into the background attack, giving a little shout-out to the original Chopper Core boss, and better conveying a sense of momentum, I think. The fight takes place on the back of a semi truck on a highway, so maybe once I have the boss in a level (and not a test room) things will make more sense visually.

Most of the other bosses are at a reasonable level of quality, hopefully needing only minor tweaks! That would be nice, as it would let me put the rest of the game together a lot faster… but I have to say, bosses are probably my favourite thing to design, so if another one needs to be re-done, I will take pleasure in doing so!

Hope you had a happy thanksgiving / black friday, my American friends!