Time for another weekly update on the grind on the final boss battle and the related cutscenes.

This week Fred has been making transitions between different Zhamla animations! Since we want the battle to feel quick and keep you on your toes, it’s important that Zhamla is able to change what he’s doing mid-animation as a response to what the player does. Normally, for any other mob, that just means we cut off the current animation and starting the next, but since Zhamla is one of the biggest sprites in the game that just ends up looking choppy in this case, unfortunately – and with this being the final battle, we definitely don’t want it to look choppy or weird in any way.

Here’s an example of what one such transition looked like before Fred added the bonus-animation:

And here’s what it looks like with his in-between animation added:

Another thing we’ve been working on is editing some of the attack effects to make sure it looks as good as possible. One such example is the spin, which originally looked like this:

Unfortunately we kind of realized it wasn’t nowhere as cool as any of the other spin-animations in the game, so we decided to remake it, using Luke’s spin as an inspiration:

We’ve also received one of the batches with sound effects needed for this final battle, but there’s still a bunch of things we need sounds for so we’re sending those requests over to our awesome sound effect master faRk as we speak.

Finally, we’re continuing to play through the game, adding those final bugs and wonky things to our list of things to fix before 1.0. While we’re finding a ton of stuff, most of them we’re OK with keeping in the game since they aren’t really all that bad, and the rest should be small and easy enough to fix. Onwards!