Ultrageist Diary # 11

The second boss is complete.
As I mentioned in a previous entry, part of the second boss can only be defeated by using a trick that speeds up the first boss. My thinking, again, is that if a player does slowly eke his way past the first boss, when he gets to the second and figures out how to damage him, the player will put two and two together and apply this new knowledge to the first boss the next time he plays the game.

My composer for Side Saddle 2, the immensely talented Nathanael Crane, is hard at work composing the three minute theme for Ultrageist. The music acts a sort of progress indicator in its own right, an auditory supplement to the time bar: the player will hear a specific musical phrase and know roughly how much time they have left, as in "Hey, this is that really kickin' part, so I'm about half-way through my time" or "oh, crap, here comes those notes, I'm down to the last minute, I'm never going to make it!"

More than indicating progress, it's also intended to instill a feeling of progress from play-through to play-through-- "last time I was only on level 2 when the music started speeding up, now I'm on level 3, I'm doing better at this". That's the feeling I want the player to have-- the feeling that they're getting the hang of it, that they're improving, becoming cleverer, that they're rapidly approaching mastery.