The last game you will ever play.
Project Role: Sole Developer
Bosses Forever has no end. The game only stops when you do.
Premise.
After a tower collides on the planet, coming from reaches of space so distant, no end can be seen, chaos erupts. As destruction ravages the land, one person, with one gun, goes to take on all of the bosses.
As the player enters the tower, a boss appears. After an epic struggle, the player rises up to the next floor. Here, another boss approaches. But this one is better. It has learned from the mistakes of the last challenger. It is stronger and smarter. This continues, far into the reaches of space. The player begins, and ends this journey, in that tower.
Fight someone your own size.
Bosses Forever uses dynamic difficulty adjustment in an arcade styled game to maintain player flow through the whole experience. Every fight is tracked in the game, accessing information on how the player is performing. This information is then used to adjust the next boss. Everything from the patterns the boss uses to specific stats, such as defense and weapon power, are adjusted based on the subtleties of the player’s style. This provides an experience that both constantly provides a balanced challenge to the player as well as a fight that is never completely the same as any previous fight.
Personal Gain.
Furthering the player’s influence on the game is the upgrade system. At the end of each fight, the player can choose to either gain 25% of his or her health back, increase the maximum amount of health, or increase the strenth of the player’s bullets. Each one of these upgrades provides a weighty bonus, but has a large impact on the rest of the play session. The balance of immediate, longterm, and critical changes to the gameplay, completely by player choice, invests him or her more deeply into trying different strategies and exploring new boss combinations.
Development.
Bosses Forever was built using Flash and the Flixel Framework. Music was provided by nickelPUNK. The development cycle lasted for one month in March of 2011. Playtesting and feedback was provided by many spirited individuals. Sean Callahan acted as the Executive Producer while I developed the game. The game was created using the following tools:
Flash Develop
Flixel
Paint.net
Pen and paper
SFXR