This last week I have been busy creating a boss for our game. To make things simple I based the bosses attacks off of early 2000's games, where you would have a massive monster slam their arms down on the battlefield and then go into a stun state for you to hurt them. On paper, it is an easy job. But that is never how reality works. 

There where quite a few animation problems to begin with, and I struggled for a few hours trying to get them to work, but then I remembered I could ask the rest of the team for suggestions. William only took moments to teach me everything I needed to know, and then it was on to programming. And it was a good thing too, because its in the programming that the real problems arose. 

I would have to say the biggest problem this whole week, has been setting up the "heavy attack" for our boss. The boss has an attack where his arm is slammed down in the arena, with only a few seconds warning from a flashing indicator on the ground. I think I spent around an hour just trying to get the blinking warning right, but then came dealing damage. I had two options, one was to set up a hitbox that spanned a large portion of the map, and the second option was to attach a hitbox to the boss's arm. The arm option is definitely more realistic, so I set to work beginning to set it up. But while testing, I realized that the arm, even if it where scaled up, leaves too much room for evasion by the player.  It also has the possibility to block the player from taking advantage of the boss's stun state, and thus they would not be able to deal damage to it. This meant I would have to go for the uglier but more functional stationary hitbox. 

Stationary hitboxes can be a lot of trouble. If the player is already within the box when its activated, it won't detect an overlap. If the player moves in and out of it before it is disabled, it registers multiple hits. And don't forget to remember that the boss's right arm is on the developer's left when facing the beast. Yes that last one is embarrassing to admit, but it happened. At the end of the day, I set up a system that, if a boolean is triggered would activate a function being called every tick. It would start grabbing all components within the hitbox, until the player is found or a certain amount of time is passed. If the player is found, damage is dealt and the search function is deactivated. This guards against multiple hits, overuse of the function, or the previous attack's projectiles activating things. All problems that where found during the rigorous testing of, admittingly, the wrong arm. I am so glad I realized that when I did!