u/seth_piano

Skip to 2:15 for the full battle!

Today I have a montage of building the attack pattern for Swift, where I paused along the way to take clips of the pattern after each step of the process.

I had to...

1. Get the opponent to spawn in a randomly-chosen corner of the screen (this alone is astonishingly complicated)
2. Have it throw obstacles across the screen in a preset movement path.
3. Discontinue the obstacles when they pass the boundary box edges
4. Once all that's in place, have it throw three cycles of obstacles as it moves across the screen.
5. Test out different boundary box sizes to see what feels most appropriate
6. Refine the pattern with a prep graphic (signals "I'm about to attack"), a sound effect, and a staggered entrance for a more visually stimulating pattern.

Fortunately I have a lot of the systems in place: a handful of preset Boundary Boxes to choose from, forcing the attack patterns to stay inside the boundary box, enforcing collision when the player overlaps with an attack, etc. But the obstacle movement itself is unique to each attack.

Overcoming procrastination is the hardest part. I stalled on this for a month, then put it together in a few hours once I put my mind to it!