The end of summer is quickly approaching and instead of hanging out at the beach we’ve designed and coded another boss! This Drill-Bot boss also doubles as another player mechanic later in the game (as seen in the video below). I implemented an inverse kinematics animation system to rig this guy and what I learned in the process will be applied to future bosses.

Another good portion of my time this month was filled up with Minecart stuff. I built out the entire level including two new sections that weren’t in TAG. I ran into a frame-rate drop issue when there were two minecarts on screen at once. That led to me redesigning a good portion of the code. Luckily, now it runs like butter.

Christine has been in animation mode this month, as well. She’s been wrapping up the NPCs for the jungle-area which includes some of these characters:

We’ve also designed and coded two more baddies, including one of my favorites which you can see in the video below:

Thanks to my success animating the Drill-Bot with inverse kinematics I’ve taken some time to experiment with how we could implement this into other areas of the game. I have a pretty decent proof-of-concept and if we determine it’s worth-while we may implement that in near future.

I’ve also updated the Road-Map based on our work this month.

Boss Design & Assets 40% – 50%

NPC Design & Assets – 50%-60%

Boracay Level – 50%-80%

It’s been a busy month for us and we’re looking forward to August! We will finally be wrapping up the jungle area (which is about 1/6th of the game) and move onto another. Looking forward to sharing our progress with you next month.