A game a day

When you're making an action game like Cletus Clay, it's kind of traditional to end each stage with a really big boss enemy. Actually, it's more than kind of traditional - it's damn near compulsory. And who am I to argue? I like giant robots and battleships as much as the next person, and when I get to the end of a level, I expect to find something at least as big as a house waiting to fight me. I wouldn't want to oppose this tradition any more than I would try to ban Christmas.

Today, I'm going to talk about the process of building one of the game's giant boss enemies.



In this instance, the boss I'll be working on is the Level 6 boss. Level 6 is flying/shooting stage, and the boss is a large flying battleship, bristling with different weapons. It is actually one of the simpler bosses, as it contains very few moving parts, so I will be able to make it as a single model rather than a whole lot of seperately animated pieces. The main animation on this boss will be the progressive damage that shows up as the player proceeds to hammer it into oblivion.

The first thing I generally do when building a large model is, I scour the house for something roughly the right shape and size to fit inside it, so I don't have to use more clay than I have to. In this case, the obvious candidate was one of our dinner bowls. (We only have two of these, so we won't be eating any curries until this model is done with.) I start by roughing in the basic shape of the ship, using the base colour.

And here is the dinner bowl completely covered in clay, with the basic shape of the ship's hull blocked out. Now it's time to add the details.

The finished model. Now comes the scary part. I'm going to take my carefully-constructed model, and progressively destroy it in front of the camera. If I screw this up, I'll have no choice but to rebuild the model and start again, so I always double-check everything before I begin.

The model goes under the camera and lights. It's a relief model built against a flat surface, so I'm shooting from above rather than the side.

The tools of the trade for doing spaceship damage are a kitchen knife and a ball-point pen. The knife is used to make cracks, and lift off damaged areas, as if the fuselage is starting to come away from the ship. The ball-point pen is used to riddle the model with "bullet holes".

Here we see the complete sequence of progressive damage - subtle at first, but by the sixth iteration, the model is pretty well smashed up. Note that only the rear of the model is shown getting damaged - this is because the player will always be attacking this particular boss from one side. In the finished animation, the images will be sliced up so that each part of the rear of the boss will take damage seperately, but for now I'm working on them all at once.

The boss model after its ordeal. I'm done with this model now, so I can reclaim that dinner bowl again.

And here is the model again, after post-processing and back in its undamaged form. You will notice that I've adjusted the colour of some of the mechanical parts slightly. I've also split the model into six different sections. The large centre part will not change, but the five smaller sections around the outside (each housing a different weapon) will all take damage and be able to be destroyed individually.