Day Seventy Nine
Today has been mostly Heptagram work! It’s coming along nicely, and I even managed to sort the intro for it - something that I’ve struggled with, honestly. I’m not particularly artistic, and giving personality to shapes is… difficult 😂
The Square was easy, it’s the first level in the game which is always going to make it stand out.
The Pentagon zooms around a lot, which was good enough but I’m still not really happy with that one.
The Hexagon is a little boring, but aesthetically pleasing.
The Triangle Twins worked quite nicely I think? Very clear that there are two of them, and they split and rejoin. Plus a bit of slowmo is always nice.
Here’s your first look at the Heptagram:
It’s big, it’s mean, and it’s a dangerously unstable individual. I think the glitchy, vibratey, googly eyed animation works pretty well to convey something of that! The glitch blocks are done with stencil buffer magic, took a good while to get right (I mentioned visual issues a little while ago - this was the cause).
I also love how goofy the eyes are. This is the first boss I’m really leaning into the decision to make googly eyes permanent, so I have actually used it in the animation.
The triangles were the first shape to be a different colour, but there were two of them and they had to be distinguished somehow. This guy is intentionally the same colour as the “angry” phases of both the Square and the Pentagon, which should give you an immediate warning that this boss is not like the ones that came before. It’s all mean, all the time.
It’s also big and pointy and intimidating - the biggest one so far!
What’s next?
I’m almost there with this boss, so we can give it a test in alpha soon. There’s just a little bit of polish left, e.g. some animation for when it gets hit by the laser (going to reuse the glitchy effect because I think it looks awesome), and the end bit of the fight is really important to get right.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my Polyfury progress. If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks for reading, and maybe check out the demo:
