Welcome back on and all to the weekly Boss 101 progress update!

Rob’s Room

When we last left Rob’s Room it was undergoing visual upgrades. The place was setup in-game to be used but we were still dropping in the last of the main art. Well, check out what happened!

Seeing as Rob’s place is one of the last main pieces of art in the game it’s pretty fitting it should showcase much of the joy we have in the work we are doing. For instance, notice the little webcams you can barely see in front of Rob and the Professor. Well those are the same webcams they use when talking with you in the Command Center. You know, the little things that count! HA!

Overall though – the room is looking sweet and we are about to drop in the rest of the animation and art to finish it up. This will involve some art echoes from other rooms in the Command Center. The TV Screens will broadcast some of the same shows from the Vending Machine Room and the Main Room. Also – we will have a couple vid screens for the other people in the command Center to call in from.

There is also another use for this room and it relates to Rob’s big wish to become one of the top robo heroes of the galaxy. His longtime dream is to be out in his own spaceship battling bad guys and fighting the good fight. Will he make it? Play Boss 101 and find out!

Rob’s Room – early pass in-game


Rob’s Room – background art done


Rob’s Room – setup in Spine


The Hands of the BOSS!

Well, we have here a look at some of the deadly weapons only the most powerful of bosses can possess! The ability to transform and manipulate matter to create weapons on the fly. Yes, the might Boss 101 has at his disposal the power of nearly unlimited weapon creation. I guess you thought it was going to be easy to take down the best of the best – NO WAY!

Check out the setup and initial look at just one of the many, many armaments in his arsenal.

Boss 101 hand conversion test inside Spine. All the work is setup to be triggered via animations. Guns are prepped by converting from the hand to the desired weapon then the firing happens. After the weapon is done firing it converts back into the hand



Sample from game converting


Sample firing giant gun from game


There you go folks and hope you enjoyed the latest looks and we will return soon with more screenshots and updates!

Remember to always live your dreams!

-Tim

Thanks so much! We are indeed working our rear ends off to make Boss 101 a game you and others will really enjoy. Ideally it will be a super fun experience for a lot of people. To us, it's not just about the arcadey parts - there are a lot of characters in the game you meet and get to know too. Dare we say there is a storyline? haha. Well, that is the intent at least. The final product will have to speak for itself. The good news is when we release it will be the very best job we could do.

Thanks again for the kind words.

-Tim

this is really cool this sort of has the CUPHEAD vibe to it where it's just pure boss fights? I am guessing you're going to add a Lirik head to one of your characters, that seems a good way to get alot of sales using that streamers cat head in games, lol.

Welcome back to another Boss 101 Weekly update! Hope your week is proceeding awesomely, ours certainly is!

Making a New Room the Smart Way

As we wrap up the main portions of Boss 101 we are frequently finding little adds we want to make to the game. These can be anything really and most every one of them involves fleshing the game story out in some compelling fashion that YOU the player will like.

One huge problem is simply time. We don’t have the time to make everything from scratch – nor SHOULD we! With a little smart thinking we can not only increase the games narrative but we can create some hige quality art assets using templates we’ve already established. Here’s how:

We needed a transport room for the game cinematics. This is a place where the guys are officially beamed out on their next mission. Think of the transporter room from Star Trek. You know, a place where there is a technician and some sort of beaming device. Well, we already have a giant super collider type thing inside the base to supply power to the various parts as well as other crazy science type things. We also already have both player and boss warp gates. Hmmm, so we need a transporter using our collider tech and the already created gates. Well, we should probably use the existing art as a jumping point right? So here we go. Let’s check out the two main parts:

Sample of Player Gate


Collider Room


Once we have those we mash them together to get the general layout. Like so:

Art composited


Now it’s a matter of creating some art guidelines to make the final pass of the area. This all took about 30 minutes total to get to this point and the end result after this will be a very integrated piece of tech as well as an efficiently made game room.

Sample of noted up art page


It’s all so easy right? HA! Well, of course this all sits on the shoulders of earlier work so it’s a good thing we created easy to use and edit Photoshop files.

Map Room Cleanup

OK – when Joshua setup the map room forever-ago it was one of the first places we ever worked on. He recently added the ability to go back and edit the files quite easily. YES!!! I made one small change from my previous setup. See if you can spot it:

Original Pass


Reworked Pass


Yes folks, the clouds all go in the same direction now. YAY!

OK – that’s a wrap for this week’s update so check back soon for our weekly screenshot later in the week.

As always - LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

Welcome back to the Boss 101 Weekly update! Here’s to you having an incredible day and let’s get rolling with the news.

Transporter Room

Last week we spoke about making art the smart way (at least as we saw it) this week we are showing you the results of that thinking. We have here the Transporter Room used to beam the guys across the galaxy to adventure. You see, ROB and the Professor have found a way to tap into the Boss network and override their controls. What this means is a way to travel about the universe relatively undetected. I say relatively since you will have to fight what’s on the other end of any gate. Once you have won a battle though the gate is yours and you can use it to your heart’s content.

So we have this little room all setup. Animations running and idles in place. How did we get here? Check it out:



After the art is done we move into Spine for animation and layout. This Spine object is directly imported into GameMaker:



From there we write our script. Something to remember here is every script starts in a spreadsheet program. This is for easy formatting. We can just cut and paste from the spreadsheet into the game scripts. Like so:

Spread sheet writeup


Cut and Paste into game Script


Then we setup the Cinematic to load the correct objects and pick the correct script. Easy PEASY!



From there we have all the ingredients to create a cinematic. It’s a matter of game triggering from that point on. It’s a great system in my opinion in that there is no programming required to do any of the above. Joshua (our programmer) setup a nice way for us to drop in cinematics as painlessly as possible.

You might be asking yourself what does this all have to do with making Boss 101 awesome and I will tell you. The easier it is to setup and debug the better YOUR product. With the system in place we can get to the final gaming experience much quicker and in doing so we can make sure things work correctly. In Boss 101 there are well over 300 various cinematics and mini cinematics. It’s important we can get in and see them working as intended quickly.

Check out a sample of the final product here:


So there you go – just some of the daily love we put into the making of Boss 101. Join us next update for more inside info and remember to always…

LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim

YES!!! Welcome again to the Boss 101 weekly update!

We’re back with knowledge to share in the hopes YOU will make a game and drop your magic on us! Let’s do it!

Indie Game Riot T-Shirt for IRX 2016

Last year Boss 101 was nominated and won the IRX 2015 “Most Revolutionary Game” award. That was a tremendous moment for myself and the team. I feel during development it is easy to get buried under the work and forget what the game is REALLY about. The game is really about YOUR (the player’s) experience. How you see and play, what you like and take away from it. With that award it we had made a move along the path of making a game people wanted to play for all the right reasons.

We were asked by Josh (running the IndieGameRiot.com site) to design a Boss 101 variation shirt for IRX 2016. The only request was to use the styling of the Boss 101 main logo. OK – here’s how it went down.

First we looked at our main logo. There were obvious tweaks to make right off. We removed the player icons from the bottom though I did ask Josh if he wanted a variation of them. The basic gist was to use the main logo and not worry about the portraits.

Main Logo


I looked at what we had and noted up a version for Manon to greyscale out. The idea here was the IRX jetpack was a slight variant of our logo. Since ours is a super jetpack we envisioned this one to be a decked out make. Sorta like a hot rod. Taking the greyscale art I noted up some ideas. It’s important to see here we are working in greyscale at first (it will be colored later). I also removed all the unneeded art since we are only concerned with the jetpack.

Original Greyscale design


Notes


From there Manon art’d up a new version and it looked SUPER spiffy. The great thing about doing art like this is grey is all about shape and form. You get a MUCH better sense of your designs without color. Not saying you should always work in grey but if you find yourself struggling to come up with something it can be a huge help. All of our main bosses are and many of the big set pieces started out in greyscale just to make it easier. Adding color is basically like painting a model. With programs like Photoshop you can just test colors till you get a great combo.

New Jetpack Logo in Grey


OK, now it was my turn. I did a color pass to create the final look. Working off the art she did was a breeze and in Photoshop I was pretty well adding in “multiply” and “color dodge” layer effects for things like highlights and general coloring. I referenced the first logo to keep the color themes close to each other.

Colored new Pack


So all that was left was to take the jetpack and add the new typography. Pretty straightforward move and here it is in all its glory. CHECK THIS OUT!!!



In fact you can already purchase one of these bad boys in the Indie Game Riot Store for a MERE $14.99 – a bargain at twice the price!



What Games Do To Us

I re-watched the 2008 film Speed Racer and for all its over the top action and cheese, one thing stood out. You could tell the people making that movie LOVED it. They put every dime up on that screen. Good or bad I have to respect someone who lives their dreams and really goes for it. Maybe you have a book, film, friend or family member who has dropped some amazing knowledge on you when you needed it. Well, Racer X dropped SERIOUS knowledge last night. I’ll paraphrase the man himself:



I believe that’s really what it’s about. What the game does for you is what matters. How it rewards or inspires you; maybe it motivates you in some fashion. Point is, games might seem to stay the same but what we let them do to US is what matters.

Remember to LIVE YOUR DREAMS FOLKS – no one else will!

-Tim  

I like your title screen. the wing motion is rad and the buttons look nice and clickable! but the clouds confused me for a second, maybe think about making the underline not quite so straight? It kind of segments the image, I first thought their was a bug

I'm finally working on something boss like myself, I probably should come and steal some inspiration from you :D

Welcome back to this week’s Boss 101 Update! Thank you for joining us!

Making a Super Boss in the Boss Maker

We have a few very special bosses you encounter during the game and for that we needed a way to call them out individually. One of the first ones of this is Jolly Rog3r, the pirate boss ship. Normally you come into the Make A Boss room and roll your boss. He gets locked in and voilà! You have a boss created for that level. For the rare case where the boss creation is a little more controlled we needed something to focus the player’s attention on the new threat and also give him the needed info to plan the correct attack.

The Steps!

So we have the normal Make A Boss, you roll and you get a boss. From there you can see what the bosses strengths and weaknesses are as well as equip your guns and hats to best battle him. Like this…



For the special ones we looked at the space we had available…



And mocked up an art piece with the needed boss image. This served as a first pass for the special boss panel. Note the simple font used for the name as a placeholder.



We took that image and did some work to polish it up and make it more “Boss 101”-ish. The font was changed and the image itself was made to look like a TV screen projection.



We noticed something was missing though and that was space for the Bosses main ability icons. For the bosses we wanted something that stood out so we looked at adding a small panel just for them. You can see it on the bottom left.



The deal was the panel should not be block the equip panel when the player is selecting a hat and gun to fight. We want the player to see both his and the boss abilities at the same time. Like so…



Se we noted up a sheet to add the panel and are working on that now…



In the meanwhile we went back to the main panel and added in animations and various ambients to make it look super swift. Check out the final with animation (minus the in-progress ability panel)



CRAZY! Looks pretty neat and the final effect with the blinking lights helps sell the uniqueness of the whole thing.

Well, that is it for this week and we hope you enjoyed a look at more of the behind the scenes process we are employing on Boss 101. Please keep those letters coming. We appreciate the feedback and the comments at the main site and via e-mail. We respond as quickly as we can!

Remember to live your dreams, no one else will!

-Tim

Scheduling makes your job a lot easier



You might not know this or you might not like to think about it but making a schedule for your project makes things a lot easier. I know we have spoken before about some of our techniques on Boss 101 but I wanted to touch base on something VERY basic that might save you a ton of time AND make your game a lot better.

What is a schedule?

I think of them as a two part item. The first is a comprehensive list of what you know is currently planned. This is all the levels, enemies, controls, UI screens, etc. You are making a big fat to-do list of everything you can think of. This is helpful for a few reasons. The main one is the process itself will get you thinking about the game in a much broader sense and help get you out of the localized thinking you might be doing. An example, maybe you want to create a plaformer or perhaps and FPS. You even have a cool hook for the gameplay. OK great. Well, when you sit down to make the game you will at one point confront things like “Will I be having checkpoints or save games? Will I have a pause feature in rounds?”. That list goes on and one. While it is all fun and game to just barrel ahead like you are working on a weekend game jam it is also helpful to think about your game as a game. You know, with all the features people tend to expect. Mostly these are the UI touches (which are normally pretty boring for developers to think about, let alone implement).

The next part of the schedule is the planning part. This is where you decide the best order of creation. Again, the most important part here is to run this though experiment with a sense of the game as you understand it. Think about some parts which logically flow together and perhaps make sense to be created in order. For instance, maybe you make the main game interface before you make the pause screens. Then you can use the ideas, colors and patterns you created there to give you a head start. The idea with scheduling is to put things in the best order to avoid wasting time.

You will not be perfect, you will forget things, you will also make mistakes and probably have more than a few moments where you wish you had a time machine. That’s OK. That happens, just correct and move on. 

Scheduling Programs

Notepad, Word, Excel, anything you can take notes in really – this is for the people who mistrust or don’t really care about all the crazy scheduling software out there. You can pretty much do anything you want as long as you have a place to write it down and check on it. That what they did for thousands of years before computers.

Scheduling software – If you have read previous columns you know I am partial to Hansoft (http://hansoft.com/). The full version is free to teams under nine people and for most people making indie games that is likely bigger than your whole team.

Some things I do in Hansoft

Setup weekly goals:

Here is a small example of how we break down the weekly progress. You can see a current To-Do list as well as a the list of prior Sprints (just another word for work we did during a particular week)



If you click on any one of the tasks you get more detailed info about it as well as any notes to help while you are working.



The Backlog – this is the area of Hansoft where your giant To-Do list exists. Every single thing you can think of should go in here. All the tasks and such are stored here permanently. They don’t go away when completed – they just get marked complete.



A typical backlog task – you can see here there is a listing for a minion where we have broken down all the needed items to make the minion work. Each of these items is a separate task for someone to do.



A close up view





Team Collaboration Software

I also recommend using Slack or Trello (https://trello.com). We use Trello for communication among the team. Whether you are in an office or the team is sperated, it’s really worth having a meeting room like Trello to drop notes and ideas for people

Some samples of our Trello boards

Art related



Programming and Code related



Again, the main thing in all of this is to HAVE FUN when you are working and enjoy the progress. It’s not something to grind through and just forget about. If you are serious about making games you had best enjoy the making of games. I might hazard a few people are making games in the hopes of collecting a big payout and retiring at 29 years old. That’s great, enjoy your time off. For many of us though we are making a career out of games and will be doing it a long time. To those I say – HAVE FUN and live your dreams!

-Tim

Super Boss Battle Tuning

So we have our train boss with his various abilities. He is a conglomeration of a lot of prior boss abilities and a test of all you have learned about Boss fights up to that point. Boy, I bet you have NEVER HEARD ABOUT THAT HAPPENING IN ANY GAME EVER! HAHAHAHAHA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

The Boss himself



At any rate, one of his abilities is the “earthquake car” or more appropriately the ground-pounder car. What this does is cause a pillar of rock and sand to come out of the ground to block your path. The idea here is you can shoot and destroy it or fly over it if you have the room and time.

For a lot of the boss fighting we are looking at giving the player choices in any situation since that seems to be the way people enjoy and remember their most awesome battles. If the player has a bunch of options then a successful decision can seem even more amazing since they feel they made the ‘correct’ choice. If there is only one solution in a situation then the game turns into a war of attrition where the player simply cycles through failure until they arrive at what the game designers wanted them to do. I should stress that BOTH situations can be used and be successful for a designer. For us in Boss 101 we are looking to give you choices though. We want you to make the moves and decisions your way as much as possible.

So the deal was – the boss weapon for the train is a copy of the boss weapon found in the regular rounds. The thing is while you are battling the train you follow it on its path across the land. The tracks it’s on go up and down and can lead you to never see the pillars coming out of the ground since you are too high to see them. Well, we needed to fix that and so we did.

Here is a sample of the old style pillars and the kind of height discrepancy you can get between the pillar and train.



Things work OK if you are near the ground...



Check out how much space you have flying around down there! CRAZY. The train battle is above this area!



Made some notes about a new pillar set



Get the new size pillar back



Example of the new pillar in scale in the game. The way the pillars work is they rise a random amount from the ground. That way we only have to create one pillar instead of a bunch of sizes.



There it is, a behind the scenes look at the way we work to create little tunes and tweaks to improve the gameplay. It’s all about giving you the choices and ultimately making the game FUN.

Thank you again for your letters and contact! We appreciate and reply as quickly as we can.

Talk with you soon and remember to live your dreams!

-Tim