As I come back to remaster my great endeavor of 2015, Teatime Samurai, I come face to face with the bizarre decisions I made, decisions I have to assume I made out of exhausted delirium, because, if not for exhausted delirium I have no excuse for why there is a boss that is a Japanese speaking steam shovel that deploys smaller versions of itself.
I will make no pretense that this boss wasn’t inspired by the great half ad half game Power Shovel from 2000. In 2015 I’d seen the hilarious AGDQ speedrun of the game and decided, for reasons I really can’t justify, to put a steam shovel in the game. Here he is, below:
Creativity shrugs
What is the move set of this boss, inspired by an incredibly weird Japanese game? Well, he throws rocks and creates smaller versions of himself. Who also throw rocks. That’s pretty much it. The one interesting part of the fight is that the shovel’s health bar, when he spawns, is a number of shovels. To actually damage the father shovel, you have to kill all the shovels he spawns (which for the sake of being edgy I’ll call the child shovels).
A theme of this series is going to be how parts of the game just feel unfinished. In my defense, it was made in 6 months when I was 19, but things like the absent grass, the absent music, and some of the boss fights feeling half baked contributes to a sense that the game needed more time. I think the steam shovel in particular is the most egregious of the boss fights, because it’s just kind of boring. It’s also locked in as the second boss fight, so you will always face it second.
Let’s fix it
We’re going to address a number of things.
- Theme/premise
- Move set
- Visuals
- Stage interactions
- Sound
Theme/premise
The boss is inspired but the Japanese game Power Shovel, which itself, like many Japanese games, borrow from the formats and tropes of Japanese game shows (on a longer time scale I think there was a great deal of cross pollination between the two mediums in a sort of constant Pizza Effect, but that’s another blog post). I had this amazing idea to work off of and did basically nothing with it, with the exception of the mini shovels speaking some incomprehensible Japanese when the spawn.
I’m adding a few things on this theme to the fight. The first is a quick intro cutscene that sets up the general premise which is that this fight is a gameshow. The second is commentary, in Japanese, which runs along with the boss fight, and comments on the things happening during the fight.
Move set
The most important differentiator to making the boss feel fun. This is still a work in progress but I’m playing with a number of things.
Instead of throwing rocks, what if the power shovel threw parts of the stage? Uprooted a tree and tossed it, rather than materializing rocks out of nowhere?
Stage hazards! It’s a steam shovel, it moves things. It could move piles of sand to prevent the player from moving around certain areas, it could move lava to hurt the player if they walk in certain areas.
Cooperative moves with child shovels. The power shovel spawns mini versions of itself, which are cute and whimsical, but right now they don’t really interact with each other in a meaningful way. What about some kind of combined move where they do an action together?
Visuals
I am a better artist than I was in 2015. Not much better, but better. Better enough to make a pass on sprites and effects. The boulders the power shovel tosses just disappear right now when they hit something. I’m adding a particle effect that makes them break into pieces, which looks a lot better and adds weight to the boulders. I’m also adding shadows to the boulders, which is a no brainer. I already implemented this capability, I just never thought to add it to the boulder, even though it’s airborne.
Stage interactions
Right now this hulking piece of machinery doesn’t interact with the stage at all, it just avoids obstacles like everything else. With the addition of interactive grass to the stage, we have a cool opportunity here. When the shovel goes over grass, it’s going to keep it dented until the end of the fight, rather than, like it would normally do, pop back up and return to its swaying state. I’m also experimenting with leaving tread tracks where it moves.
Also, it’s a piece of equipment designed to move things, and yet, due to its size, it often gets stuck behind obstacles. I’m adding logic so that if the shovel gets stuck behind a tree or a building, it will just nudge it out of the way with a mighty thump.
Sound
In 2015, file size mattered a lot more than it does now, which isn’t to say that I’m adding uncompressed FLACs to the soundtrack, but, with games now being 90GB, I can afford to add more than two sounds to the boss. I’m adding new and improved Japanese VO for the power shovel and its children as well as additional sound effects for the different moves and interactions the power shovel performs. Like I said above, I’m adding color commentary conversation between two announcers in Japanese
Impact
This is just one boss of many, and not the only one that needs attention, but it is one of the more blatant examples of things that need finessing to rerelease this game in good conscience.