How does your game fit the Theme & Boss Battle Edition?
You play as the Minotaur (“the boss”) defending against an attack by Theseus (the “hero”).

Deliberate design decisions were made to seem as if the game is meant to be played as Theseus, with you being the ‘hero’, when you actually play as the Minotaur. The primary example of this is that the difficulty is inverted: the game starts on Impossible and ratchets down to Tutorial (and another bonus difficulty).

The difficulty gets ‘easier’ for the hero, and, in doing so, gets harder for the actual player. Over time, the hero gains new abilities (dodging, projectile attacks, faster movement), even resorting to save scumming, whilst the boss gets weaker. Eventually, you reach ‘tutorial’, where even the game system will try to make the hero win…

We had fun with the dialogue as well. If you were the boss, trapped in an infinite loop, how would you grapple with the idea that your whole life is a life?

Game Engine?

Game Engine / Tools (Other)?
Pro pixelizer, all 3d models, textures and other assets are home made

Self-made & used stuff?

Have you joined a game jam before?

Roughly how much time did you spend developing? (in hours)
75 hrs x 2 (2 people)

Anything else you'd like to share about your game or development process?
Kaimune:

Early iterations of the art direction was mostly fine tuning our 3d pixelizer rendering pipeline, which we had wanted to use from the start, which evolved into a minimalistic retro color pallet containing mostly of greys and blues. The retro aesthetic was just the visual design pillar we went for, sfx, vfx, lighting, and chunky 12 frame stepped animations were just ideas that naturally followed.

A big realization is that some small effects go a long way in these hack and slash games. screen shake, followed by screenshake, with a small sfx sells the whole attack sequence actually feel fun and satisfying.

The UI was rather tricky as I had little experience with actually drawing 2d sprites, but it needed to be done and I was willing to learn. The method I learnt was quite simple, using a 9 slice tile across textboxes and backgrounds of dialogue and hp bars.

The biggest issue was implementing and solving merge conflicts as we often had worked on parts of the scene/prefabs without explicitly mentioning it, which lost us some precious time we needed.

Overall from an design perspective, I think we did rather well, executing both the the idea of an anti-hack and slash, and how it fits the thematic of a reverse boss battle game. There are a few visual bugs such as the bugged hp bar at the start, or our render texture missing on the web version, we simply didnt have time to resolve.

Banana:

The main development hurdle we faced was the challenge of how to make the boss’ attacks feel boss-like, yet at the same time be satisfying. In a normal game, boss attacks are telegraphed, slow, and often feature move-locks during the various phases. Qualities that also make movement feel sluggish, non-responsive, and not rewarding for players.

Our compromise was to still keep the slow aspect of each attack, and still heavily punish players for missing an attack - whilst also making the attacks ‘feel responsive’. The player is allowed to move during every boss attack, but the hit damage will not happen instantly ( ~1s windup). We made each attack feel impactful (camera shake + vfx) - and we still made the player die to a maximum of three attacks.

Additionally, we also had to ideate ways to make the ‘hero’ feel humanlike. A reaction speed of 250ms was added. This meant that any action that was taken by the hero was made relative to information 250ms old. Furthermore, the hero is a lot more mobile than the boss - and can dodge forecasted attacks by the boss.

These design decisions were such that the ‘boss’ fight felt like a boss fight, even with you playing as the boss, and yet remained responsive enough to not feel overly sluggish