I'll get the disappointing news out of the way right now, there will not be bosses in cliffside reaper 2. I felt I'd focus on varying mechanics in enemies that add to the platforming rather than spend on bosses. Definitely don't want to look back on this and regret the time spent away from the initial focus, tight platforming.

Being that in this game you die in one hit, the boss mechanics would play out in a different direction than I was initially interested in going for. If we have a boss that has multiple stages through a fight, but you have one life, do I checkpoint each stage of the boss?

I guess it could be made to work in a one life style, but want to get this game out there by mid September for free lol. Maybe if I get into a metroidvania style game I'll explore some ideas a little more in the boss department.

--end sadness--

This week I've been focusing on adding levels to the game, tweaking some more things, squashing bugs, etc.

You can see the first few levels (subject to change) above. Right now I have 12 levels in, some are small, some are big. Definitely a lot more content than cliffside reaper 1 already lol.

I actually played through the first cliffside reaper again the other day and this feels like a totally different game now to be honest. There will be more story involving death and purgatory and none of that will be spoiled in these updates.

Skeletons now correctly wander until hitting a wall or edge of platform, even moving platforms, without falling off or getting stuck! Ended up rewriting the skeleton code to get this working. Sometimes it can be faster to start fresh than to try to work features in to a rigid piece of code, and it's all in git anyway!

About the skeleton, it's kind of a goomba. Not meant to be much of a challenge, more of an obstacle that causes problems if you're not paying too much attention. They're almost like barrels from the first game but move.

This will be the only enemy that has no other purpose than to be kind of annoying. Going forward I'm making every enemy have some kind of platforming mechanic or solid movement pattern to play into the flow of gameplay.

Speaking of which:

Here we have a frog, is it part of deaths army? Does it have any kind of story? Nope, just randomly thought of it when trying to come up with some platforming challenges. I guess it's a demon that's not quite bad enough for hell so it hangs out in purgatory.

The frog sticks its tongue out at a set interval. Both the frog itself and the spiky tip of its tongue are deadly, but the tongue acts as a wall when fully extended.

A little design tidbit about the tongue. When extending, the hit box for the tongue is actually present early. The hit box also goes away late when retracting. The hit box for the hostile tip comes and leaves only when fully extended.

I felt extending this window will make this mechanic feel fair when the player misses jumps to and from the tongue as you have an extra split second to jump off the tongue as it retracts making it easier to rely on the queue of the animation rather than memorizing the pattern.

I also encountered a bug that I'm glad became more obvious when I added this enemy. Jumps were being incorrectly counted but only became an issue if a wall disappeared while you were hugging it. The bug would cause the player to not be able to jump when the tongue collision turned off but only when double jumping to the tongue. Everything seemed fine if you single jumped to the tongue.

Got that fixed and now when the collision goes away after the frog sucks its tongue back in you get a reliable, working, jump

This enemy has provided some good inspiration for a couple levels on it's own, but as I get in more "mechanical" enemies like this I will be meshing them together to get some variety in the level designs.

Check back next week for another update and thanks for reading!

Also a note, due to the three day weekend I got for labor day, the update came today, Monday, instead of the usual Sunday. I'll make sure to post every Sunday and give notice when I'm coming out with something late due to a holiday next time!