Hello readers! I hope you have been enjoying the Shrink Squad story so far. It has been a lot of fun to make and we appreciate all of you for the time and support you have given us and this story!
This section is just a creators reflection on the first chapter of Skylanders Shrink Squad, Sheepapalooza. There will be two reflections on this chapter, the first coming from the great Gaming Scientist regarding everything that went into the creation of MUGO: PROPHET OF DOOM, the playable game for the Sheepapalooza boss battle. (Link in our discord and Chapter 1 of this story).
The second reflection is my own on the creation of the story. This includes the reasoning for everything and just the general idea behind the level.
First up is the creation of the playable boss battle by Gaming Scientist.
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Introduction - Gaming Scientist
Around the start of January 2022, shortly after the completion of a microgame that tested out Chef Pepperjack's basic attacks, I got to work with programming the revised boss fight of "Sheepalooza" based on its original documentation.
The first things that I did were copy-pasting my original code from Chef Pepperjack's microgame into a new project and creating the basic arena and boundaries for the boss fight. I rewatched a YouTube video on boosting in a 2D environment that I originally used to create Chef Pepperjack's boost in his prototype before it was lost in spaghetti code. I made some revisions to this boost code for Sheepalooza's boss.
With Chef Pepperjack, the main character that I am intending to use when testing each of the levels and bosses, coded and the arena built, I got to work with coding the boss, Mugo. I used a simple capsule with a collider to test his movement. As he does not track the player, it was relatively easy to google a solution for randomized movements in the arena.
Enemy Programming
The third priority was creating the enemies that Mugo summons. As my specialty is programming ranged attacks, I made the minions turn to look at the player every frame using the transform.LookAt command and shoot a bullet every two seconds with a one second spawn delay.
With the additional non-boss enemies' randomized spawn positions coded, I transitioned to programming Mugo's health. It was around this time that our leader adjusted Sheepalooza's documentation to provide more information on the enemies' health, attack patterns, and damage. Mugo's minions originally had 175 health and were on a five second spawn timer. As the maximum damage that Chef Pepperjack can do at any time is 60 with his primary attack during his boost from his tertiary attack, it was impossible for the player to stay on top of Mugo's spawns. I reduced the enemy health to 50 and decreased their spawn frequency to once every 15 seconds.
The documentation's description of Mugo's minions was that they leap into the air and slam into the ground with their bladed arms. I started to adjust their code but it proved to be too complicated for me to get done in one day. I moved their official attack method to the backlog, the "extras" that I would attempt to implement once the base product was made.
In my scramble to re-code the enemies' attacks, I accidentally applied their bullet script to their gameObjects. I spent the rest of that evening looking on Stack Overflow and Unity's forums to find an answer for why the enemies would teleport to the player's location when spawned in. I resolved it by looking at the enemies' Inspector window in the Unity Editor and removed the bullet script. As soon as it was removed, the enemies resumed their normal behavior of standing in one spot and shooting bullets at the player every two seconds.
Mugo's Attack Patterns
Next up was Mugo's attacks at 75%, 50%, 25%, and 10% health. Upon reaching those thresholds he was to teleport to the center of the arena and call various projectiles for 10 seconds depending on which threshold he was at. Lasers would spawn from four random locations during his first intermission. Bullets would fly every which way in his second transition. He would then combine the lasers and bullets for his last two phases.
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Skylanders: Shrink Squad
AdventureA for fun Skylanders 7 game that tells the story of a brand some brand new villains, The Mist and The King of Chaos as they put their new plans into action. A new squad of Skylanders known as the Shrink Squad have risen to the challenge and are prep...
