TOO DX

Hi everybody!

Our daily format has fallen into disuse. I blame myself mostly - Auston is crunching in his other job and I’ve been letting myself get distracted writing narrative and trying to stitch together a coherent plot. I’ll try to be better, I swear. Oh yeah, plus I’m back in NH now - so that’s different.

So what do I want to talk about? What is this set of problems I am referring to? Simply this: making games is equal parts about putting out something we can be proud of and hitting deadlines. Sometimes compromises have to happen or…. sometimes they don’t. In this case, don’t won out.

For those of us we spoke to at APE and other places, we said multiple times that we would be releasing a finished version of BOSSES FOREVER 2.BRO this week. I’ve told reviewer that, I’ve told players that, I’ve said that on Facebook, in Twitter DM’s (and publicly I think), I’ve had people ask me for updates.

We aren’t releasing BOSSES FOREVER 2.BRO this week. We’re sorry about that, but it can’t be done.

Here’s why:

1. game balance is off for the middle level set. We noticed a bug when showing off at APE where he would get pattern stuck; that led us to a whole section of code that was borked and after that was fixed Auston has been tweaking his difficulty ramp so the boss doesn’t just stomp new players anymore. 
2. we added in a secret. Don’t tell anyone
3. we had been wrestling with a problem for some time; reviews constantly said they wanted the boss sprite to change and we weren’t willing to do that for a couple of reasons which we’ve covered before (in our fancasts I think). BUT! We were hearing this feedback and we wanted to do something. So we did. It involved changing some art assets and implementing a feature for the bosses damage when he body-slams you.
4. Hey a rare bug appeared! Yep. We found a game breaking bug once. I was having a great run on the test flash build and at level 35 my bullets started phasing through the boss. I wasn’t actively analyzing his patterns so I had no information to give Auston. Rather than try to redo my progress multiple times and isolate, Auston made the call to re-write the code entirely for bullet/boss collision.
5. PC build is flat-out unplayable.This is a link to an open forum Auston goes to for help on some of the issues. He also directly tweeted at the OpenFL guru. We still don’t have a fix - but the game runs like balls on the PC. We’re working on it.
6. Optimization for loading patterns. We were having slowdown, especially on the Ouya, when loading the next boss. It was significant enough to warrant changing bits of the code. With the PC build being shit as well, Auston went through a bunch of the setup code and tried to tweak it to optimize for PC as well; net result = no bug fixes, game runs 2x better at least on the Ouya
7. Polish. Things didn’t feel right. We both thought that. Then Auston tried a few new things and had me play a new build and things felt better. The more he tinkered, the better the game got. Some of the changes were based on player feedback (from APE, or friends), some were based on gut feelings, a few were just to see if he could get the boss to do something cray-cray.
8. New patterns: so the old beta version on bossesforever.com is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of date. However, you’ll notice that the boss’ bomb patterns are much much harder in that version. That’s because he only had 2 or 3 bomb patterns and when he started using bombs that’s all he would do. We didn’t like that - the ramp was too high, bombs are a relatively nasty experience anyways and it needed to be changed. That led to a discussion on what we should do that resulted in Auston deciding that he needed 20 patterns for each weapon that would scale with the weapon effectiveness to help keep the difficulty consistent. That’s gonna take him a week, he says, but after he did it for 1 weapon the game was so much better that I reluctantly agreed that it was worth it.
9. Bugs. Holy shiz-nozzles, were there some unintended bugs we found. Hi-score bugs, graphical glitches, powerup glitches, difficulty ramp errors, math errors in pattern selection algorithm (he’d lock to a pattern because it’s effectiveness was being calculated incorrectly), rotation errors, facing erros - all sorts of bugs. The most egregious was a bug were his damage increase wasn’t allocating properly and a bug where the graphical switchout on his bullet sprites (which is supposed to indicate lethality based on color) wasn’t happening at all. Several of our recent tweets lately have been based off of our 17th-century style bug hunts.

Yeah. Considering I can barely parse the code and have no idea what’s going on within the actual files, and that Auston can only do stuff late at night after he gets out of work, the progress we’ve made is substantial. It just isn’t “there”yet. 

We won’t release a compromised product - that I can guarantee you. Instead, we will work on it until it is done. We’re almost there! We think most of the bugs are gone, the score-board works, the old-school secret is in place - all that’s left for major work is design/implement/test/fix cycle for the new patterns.

That game is leaps and bounds better than that old demo that you’ve played. I totally think it’s worth the wait.

Kuma Out (wishing he was slaying bosses to some sweet liquid DnB like he was a few nights ago)