From Concept to Life ( Tagu pt.4)

Man, Wednesday came by fast. Last Friday our kick starter campaign ended, and we were successful! We Appreciate all the support we have received and have already begun production of some of the rewards.

Today I’ll talk a bit about how Tagu is designed for combat. I wanted Tagu to look and feel sort of like an impenetrable Juggernaut. Tagu has extremely high armor and magic resist which reduces the damage he takes greatly. Tagus magic resist is significantly lower then its armor in order to give players that choose to play as a spell caster a bit of an advantage for this particular Boss fight.

All of Tagus attacks and movements are very slow and become predictable after you’ve been fighting for a while. I did this to allow the player lots of time to react to what Tagu is about to do, but I made the attacks very punishing in terms of the damage they do so they feel appropriately like they should be coming from such a massive enemy. Getting hit by Tagu is usually a result of being impatient and just rushing him or trying to get that one extra combo hit in when you know you should have stopped and evaded.

While tagus armor and resist suits his character is would make the fight extremely long if left alone, so I had to design in a weakness. I designed a large formation of mana crystals on Tagus back which serve as the source of his power. Every time Tagu attacks it costs mana, which the player is able to see along side Tagus Health bar. I implemented a number of incentive’s to make the player engage tagu rather then just evade him until his mana runs out. Different attacks cost different amounts of mana, so a skilled player will goad Tagu into specific attacks in order to drain mana faster. Every strike you land on Tagu causes it to shield itself which also drains mana. Finally there is the “Boss Battle Rating” wich tracks the time it takes you to beat a boss and rates you accordingly but I will get into that in another post. When Tagu is out of mana it enters a state where it is vunerable while it recharges it’s mana. This is the time when the player needs to go all out to get their damage in. I made sure that Tagus animations for the most part obscure the crystals so that it is very apparent when he is in this vulnerable state.

There are still some animations and tweaking to do but so far I find Tagu to be a pretty fun Boss Fight. I’ll try to get a vid of his battle up when all of his animations are done. One Down side of making his attacks very slow is that they require a LOT of animations frames.