Skylanders: Shrink Squad

Ch. 7 Reflection

Gaming Scientist's Reflection:

Introduction
I have been looking forward to remaking Woodburrow because I find that executing boss attacks is usually much faster than coming up with solutions to puzzles, and this is my best shot to flex my knowledge of Swap Force's lore. In the meantime, I revised Trap; Shadow; Sunburn; Series 3 Trigger Happy, Chop Chop, and Spyro; Series 2 Cynder, Wrecking Ball, Lightning Rod, and Prism Break; and Series 1 Slam Bam and Hex's entries in Skylanders DPS Analysis and added two Dear Boom Diary chapters that will precede some fast-paced action.

It may be hard to believe, but the exact details regarding the five corrupted bosses were all compiled over two days. We spent another two days before that creating an outline for who exactly would be fought before the King of Chaos. My creative juices were running on empty by the time we finished Messa, but I thought the story draft was worth it.

Now that it has been over a year since it was first made, there were some things that could have been improved about the writing. The new draft in Unity, which began on 24 October 2023, makes some adjustments to the prose and adds the villainous trio of Eclipse, Cluck, and Meteor Shower. The chicken is reformed from Swap Force and Superchargers, while the vampire and dinosaur are enemies in Legends.

My vertical slice was due on 8 December, when I had hoped to finish the King of Chaos' boss fight. I finished him with about two weeks to spare, so I pushed myself to complete the movesets for Guk, Rufus, Fleesly, the Dark Hydra, Rival, and Mistfin and Messa's second phases before then. All eight of them could either be fought at once or individually. The only issues our leader had were a UI bug and Rival and Cleasai's overly large health pools, so I had until the 16th (the beta deadline) to make the layout and add slightly more polish to the Skylanders' and enemies' visuals, animations, etc.

Most important of all, I finally fixed the issue of the physics body treating downhill slopes as descending a bazillion platforms, making traveling down them a pain because the player could not dash. The solution was as easy as copying some code I found on Unity's forums to shoot a laser beneath the Skylander body every frame (raycasting). If something is within a set distance of the raycast, the script is tricked into thinking that the body is still on solid ground even when descending stairs.

The beta included each of the activities between bosses, difficulty buttons, and fog during the King of Chaos' fight. The only gameplay feedback was that placing the AMBs was too tedious because each one was tied to a specific location, so I adjusted my code for any to be placed at any location before adding the story, NPCs, and other enemies. The final draft was ready on 4 January 2024.

The Woodburrowians
Most of the Woodburrowians (whose collective name came from "Oregonian") were afterthoughts since my greatest priority was making sure all six bosses work for the story. The only enemy I cut was the Flying Mist Archer because of how I reworked the turret sequences.

I reused the code from Meteor's van for the Foghog. The scripts work by having the entities they are attached to look at their target if the charge timer is greater than 0. Once the timer gets to 0, the entity begins charging until they either hit someone or would run off the NavMesh, at which point their script's charge timer refreshes. For example, the timer for the Evilized Boghog and Foghog is 8 seconds.

I programmed the Mistkite before Messa's first phase in the beta to get a feel for dive-bombing without teleportation, and it requires some suspension of disbelief. It first "flies" to its destination, with its hitbox disabled and the rig hovering a set distance from its actual location like the King of Chaos during The Illusionist's Staff (TIS). When it gets close enough, it waits for 1 second before snapping the model to its location and spawning a shockwave. Then, like Evilized Whiskers, it waits for 9.5 seconds before "flying" again.