In most games when a character performs an attack or is on the receiving end of one, they make a noise, and Reina & Jericho is no different in that regard. Every single yell, grunt, gasp, and groan needs to be recorded. No big deal: we’re done that already. Usually there is a bit of audio processing that needs to be done too. Again: not a big deal, that’s already done. But that leaves one incredibly simple but boring task: breaking them up into individual sounds. We have these nice long recordings of our voice actors grunting 100 times in a row, but when Reina hits a boss with her sword we don’t need them to yelp 100 times in a row, we need them to do it just once. Which means that big old file with 100 grunts needs to be chopped up into 100 files with 1 grunt each. It ain’t pretty, it ain’t fun, but it’s a task that needs to be done. And that’s been my morning. These last two weeks have been about tidying some of the platforming mechanics (a bit more work needs to be done on one or two, but we are in a pretty good place for now), cleaning up some level design – mostly related to routing and save point placement (related to that: did you know Super Metroid only has 20 Save Points in the entire game?), and preparing for boss fights. The grunt stuff I mentioned earlier is part of boss fight prep, as is rigging up our last few 3d models for animation. We still have a handful of 3d models that are being worked on, but the majority are ready to go and next week (hopefully even later today) the task of coding a ton of boss fights can begin. All of them have been planned at the theoretical level, several have been implemented in some manner, but the plan (at this point) is to really set up a production pipeline and recode all of them based on the framework developed for the Inquisitor boss fight in the demo. We tried a few different approaches, but the ones used for the Inquisitor's was the simplest and most powerful, so that is going to be used on all of them now as we go through and tidy all of them up. I’ll likely write more on the subject in the next update or so, but one of the things I didn’t anticipate was how boss mechanics would move around. I assumed there would be lots of iteration based on difficulty and timing and overall feel, but some moves just belong in different boss fights. For example, the Spymaster enemy (depicted in the hard-to-look-at first trailer we released) originally had two noteworthy attacks: one was a counterattack where she would attempt to bait Reina into attacking her and then block it and counterattack, the other was a big lightning attack that hit a large vertical area and pulled the player into the damaging area. The problem is that both of those moves make a lot more sense thematically in different boss fights. It’s not a huge problem – the work is still done and they can be ported easily enough to those other battles. The problem is that now the Spymaster fight is short two moves, and we may need to rethink the existing ones to make sure they all fit together once new ones are added. It’s a fun problem though, and I’ll let you know how it goes soon =)