Today was a frustrating day, for many reasons! Of my 6ish free hours to work on the game, 3 were spent trying to fix one bug - not the way I wanted to spend half the day. I did end up getting some work done on the Heptagram, but it was mostly Pentagon bugfixes in the end. One of the major things I’ve wanted to sort for ages were the sudden audio transitions between boss phases. It didn’t feel good, so on the Pentagon it is now actually synced properly (sound on):

Well, sometimes synced properly. See, the issue is that this is a 22 second loop - and I absolutely do not want the player to sit around for an extra 22 seconds if they miss it, so there’s a 5 second cap. If you get to the phase transition with less than 5 seconds left on the loop, it will continue nicely as above. You can actually get it to immediately phase shift if you time it well enough - keep an eye on the clock, the track is pretty much exactly 22 seconds long so you want to try change the phase at a little before 44s, 43s would be the safe bet, but be aware it will finish the current attack first, so you’ve got to build a few seconds in for that. If you do this, you should be pretty much guaranteed the 4x multiplier for time.

If you miss that window though, there’s up to 5 seconds where the boss will centre and charge up. You can’t damage it during this time, so you’ll lose precious seconds on the clock, though you’ll still spawn points while hitting it, so you shouldn’t lose your multiplier.

I’m aiming for all bosses to have this interaction with the music, so it will be the end of sudden audio transitions! Audio synced stuff always feels really good, so it’s nice that I could get this in there today. I’ll tidy up the actual animation and sync it to the audio at some point, too :)

What’s next?

I really am going to prioritise the Heptagram tomorrow, I won’t have much time to work on it but I’ll try get the intro animation done. That’s always something I put off - I’m no animator, but I think I’ve done ok with the others so far!

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: