Here, have some progress.

That's the new first boss (Snowman was way too boring).

What is it? A hyper-active ninja bunny that spins around at the speed of sound and hurls yellow snowballs at you.

Here's something horrible:

This was my absolute first game I made in GM. Fear it's terribleness.

Of course, this wasn't really my first game. That was a DOS breakout game I made in Turbo Pascal, which was fortunately lost to the Byte-stealer.

Oh, and then there were the Game Editor games. Horrible. Just plain horrible.

A word about designing Boss AI

Well, I coded the boss battle in it's entirety in about 10 minutes. No, it's not very intelligent, but it still counts as LINEAR AI, which is basically a scripted battle.

How did I do it? Using states. I have a variable I use called phase, and another called timer. Phase 0 is usually the setup, and it sets phase to 1. Phase 1 counts down timer and performs the next action when timer is 0 etc etc.

I'm thinking about writing a short document about this sort of AI system, but CBA to do it unless somebody asks nicely.

So with that, have some pie.

Now back to work before my sanity returns.