Welcome to this latest Boss 101 update!
As you might know we are well into tuning the game and making it as fun as we can for YOU! An area of interest is the amazing HAT STORE and all the wonderful goodies you can purchase in it.
We have over 200 hats and most all serve a practical purpose when it comes to playing the game and winning with style. If you have been following the dev blog you know hats provide a good amount of buffs to your character. They can beef up your weapons, give you more money when you win and they can protect you from boss attacks. That right there is a MOUTHFUL so let’s look at how we are balancing and tuning the numbers to make the most sense for you the player.
We start with a gigantic Excel sheet with all the hats and abilities listed on it. From there we can see how things relate to each other and how to scale the cost and performance of the hats. We actually do a similar thing for guns and other products in the game too.
The beginnings of all tuning – the planning stage
You can see we have a specific layout here to help speed up the inputting of abilities into the game. The Excel sheet (or Google Docs if you prefer) contains the names of the powers as well as the associated sprites and code which is called to use the hat. Once everything is nice and tidied up here it is a small matter of some cut and paste to bring this into the game.
The sheets have the sprite names for easy cut and paste
We are using GameMaker for Boss 101 and here are the kinds of fun things you too can expect when bringing your game to life. CODE and lots of it. Don’t be afraid! Well-structured code is your friend and mine. Boss 101 has a rather orderly code base to make things easy for a low level code guy like myself. That is all due to the powerhouse abilities of our lead programmer Joshua. He’s helped setup a situation where I can go in and implement easy changes and adjustments to the game. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a strong group of people on your team. It makes all the difference in your day to day.
Opening up Gamemaker and diving in
Handling the hat scripts
Once things are setup you can see the result in the Hat Store. Here we have a Kell hat ready to go for testing!
Over in the Make a Boss we have a typical situation you, the player, will encounter. A new boss with abilities you want to counter. So, pop open the Equip panel and search for the perfect lid to bring into battle. As you can see, boss abilities are listed on either side for easy comparison to your abilities. For instance this boss looks to have a web shooting arm. Well, thankfully the Kell hat looks to have a pretty decent amount of web resistance.
If you are feeling froggy you can even hit the ole RANDOM button to try your luck. Better yet, maybe you want to trust ROB with your battle plan. He will pick what he feels it the best hat and weapon you have for any particular battle.
So there you have it. A short look at the kind of work we are putting into one small aspect of Boss 101. There’s more to come each week as we look at more of the systems going into the game. In the meanwhile – thank you for stopping by and for your support!
Remember always to live your dreams!
-Tim