Another week, another boss! It seems like Ref has really hit a good pace with the bosses and they're coming out of the press faster than I can put them into the game.  This week's is the monstrous culmination of all of the dark rituals going on in the desert with our crazy berserker cultists, a massive human sacrifice of conjoined flesh, fused together with the strange substance brought out by the blood moon

As dangerous as it is gross, I immediately loved this design when I saw it and actually decided that this should be the last boss for the level. The last boss is always the strongest and most aggressive because unlike the other ones you face them alone.  I thought that this was a perfectly imposing creature and I spent the week updating it's move set so that all of the attacks were tuned faster since there would be no other enemies helping the creature fight.  Only 2 more bosses remain before we are done with all of the level - art for the game's demo!

Music

On another note, Juan has been doing a great job working on the level tracks for the game! He has already completed the Main menu music which made the game feel much more like a real game every time I boot it up.  It's intense and very dark which I personally loved for the first title.  This week, he started working on the Track for the first level, which I requested to have dark forest vibes.  So far its coming along great, and for the first time in my game development career, I've had to start analyzing game music on a more critical level.  It's been very insightful to see what matters when creating a level track, and I've been updating my audio system to support more complex cross fading and transitions while all of the audio is still being created.  Can't wait to see what's to come!

Programming

On the coding side of things I've been hard at work polishing the game so that it animates and looks better!  Speaking with some fellow developers, I've taken to heart the importance of having the game FEEL good to play, so I've been revisiting my quests and characters and enemies to give them particle effects and animations that make killing them all the more satisfying.  I'm getting close to finishing this face lift and I cant wait to share it in the coming weeks!

On the more boring side of programming, I've also fixed some bugs that have been plaguing the game.  Under the hood, there were actually 2 separate saving solutions, one for the dialogue and one for my custom save data, and recently the former as become obselete.  Since there's no reason to leave it in, I deprecated all of the code which really cleaned up my save system.  I'm hoping that this will mean less bugs when moving game game version et cetera.  

Lastly, I've had an issue since day one with screen resolutions where the user interface was not retaining it's screen ratios on wide screen.  This was a very tricky issue but I managed to find the culprit was one of the prefabs I was using has a different setting on it's aspect ratio setter.  It was one of those "I missed a semi-colon" mistakes which unfortunately cost me several days.

Next Week

Going forward, I'm going to try to finish cleaning up my lighting system so that the 2 levels do a better job illuminating the world and providing contrast.  I've booted up a couple games such as 20 minutes till dawn to see how they handle things and their default darkness colors and am excited to try a few things: namely adding more light sources to particles and other moving vfx.  I think it will add a very cool feeling of fighting in the harsh light of the blood moon!