Boss hit reactions, boss attacks, and player hit reactions are mostly done. Just the death sequence and phase transitions left. The end is finally in sight — this one was rough. Since even the movement is built as patterns, instead of a behaviour tree I just need to decide what state comes next at the end of each one. Assembly should take a day or two, tuning maybe 3–4 more days.
I also fixed two bugs that had been sitting around for almost two years. Both turned out to be Unreal bugs. First one: a scene component attached to a movable character would occasionally behave as if it were static. It only happened sometimes and I couldn’t reliably reproduce it, so I never managed to track down the cause — until I caught it while building the new boss camera. Attaching a fresh scene component fixed it. What’s strange is that if you attach a static mesh component to a static mesh actor in the background, the component gets added as movable, but if you attach a component to a movable actor like a character, it sometimes attaches as static. Second bug: in shipping builds only, Niagara beams were getting culled. I’d only seen one report and couldn’t reproduce it — until today, when it suddenly showed up in my own shipping build. I tried everything but couldn’t fix it. People online say beams aren’t reliable, so I replaced them with spline meshes. Still need to test, but it feels great to clear two bugs that old.
The first boss took 2 months. This second one has taken 5 weeks so far including modeling, and maybe ¼ to ⅓ of that time went to trailer and PR work. So roughly a month of actual boss work, with 3–4 days left. Bosses feel like tangled bundles of video clips — not the most fun thing to build — but the build time is going down, which is something. I want to finish the last boss in May and wrap the build in June. I’ve picked up a lot of know-how on this one, so for the next game I’d like to try something simpler that I can finish in 1 to 1.5 years.
Submitting to a game show taught me a lot. I’d been pretty naive about it. Turns out game shows are closer to an advertising market than a place that gives indies a leg up. Submission costs are steep and the math doesn’t really work for a game my size, so I ended up dropping it. I just released the trailer on its own. Feedback’s been mixed — it’s a tone I hadn’t tried before. I’ll do better next time.
Anyway, the end is getting closer and that feels good. Whether it ends well or not, finishing something is its own reward.