This is a project I worked on for 7 months, we were only 2 programmers in the team. I was in charge of the boss fights and some gameplay elements, but my main task was to fix bugs and optimize old code to make it run better. With only 2 programmers, we had a lot of different tasks, whether it was asset integration or even design decisions, we were always involved. Most of my time was spent on finding bugs in the engine by trying to break the game and experimenting with the levels.
Gameplay
This is a good example of old mechanics that I revamped. Here, I worked on a mechanic similar to Portal which let the player or an object teleport through two portals. We could only use portals on certain surfaces and it would also calculate the velocity of the object that went through to send it through the other one with the same velocity. This is only a prototype of the mechanic as we didn't have any assets for it back then, but it mostly works as intended.
Boss - Fox
Here, I had to create a massive boss bigger than the player. It was a new mechanic that we wanted to try as we didn't have any big bosses before and we thought it would be interesting to play with different dynamics like that. It was a good challenge to try to make the battle difficult while giving the player feedback for every attack, all of that without having any animations or art for the fight. To beat this boss, you had to hit his crown multiple times so it would then break and make the fox vulnerable. Another challenge was that everything needed to be synchronized to the music, which took a lot of time just to make it feel good and satisfying.
Here, I had to create a massive boss bigger than the player. It was a new mechanic that we wanted to try as we didn't have any big bosses before and we thought it would be interesting to play with different dynamics like that. It was a good challenge to try to make the battle difficult while giving the player feedback for every attack, all of that without having any animations or art for the fight. To beat this boss, you had to hit his crown multiple times so it would then break and make the fox vulnerable. Another challenge was that everything needed to be synchronized to the music, which took a lot of time just to make it feel good and satisfying.
Fox boss fight preview phase 1 (no art)
Fox boss fight preview phase 2 (no art)
Boss - Groundhog
For this boss, I had to design a fight that was much faster and the boss had to be out of range most of the time except for when he attacked: he would come down and try to hit the player, making him vulnerable in the process. The groundhog had an attack where potions would be falling down from the sky and there were 3 different types of potions that had different effects. The explosive potion would create a big shockwave, the ink potion would cover the player's screen with ink, similar to Mario Kart's Blooper and the red potion would invert the controls of the player. The boss would also throw scissors at the player which would travel from one side of the screen to the other. It took a lot of time because many mechanics were scrapped during development and a lot of them were completely changed or updated. Finally, the boss fight was also synchronized to the music with every action based on a tempo that you could set in the editor following a custom bpm for every fight.
Groundhog boss fight (no art)