Turbo Pudding
In Tirralee, a bubble is the answer to almost everything. Blow one at a grumpy spirit, pop it, and the spirit gets its song back. Except for three of them. The bosses of the Skyward Tree are too big for any bubble. It’s Wednesday, so here’s a page from our dev diary about how we built those fights around a different helper: fireflies.
The picture at the top is the first boss room, at the end of level 2. Old Dandel, a big dandelion spirit with a scribble cloud over its head, hovers on the right. Two golden bubbles are already rising, each with a sleepy firefly inside. Lee is looking up and working out what to do.
Why bubbles slide off
Every spirit on the Tree is under the same spell, and you can see it: a little gray scribble cloud floating over its head. Ordinary spirits are small enough to wrap in a bubble and pop. A boss isn’t. Bubbles simply can’t hold it.
We liked that rule because it turns a boss into a puzzle you already half know. You’ve spent two levels blowing bubbles. Now the game asks you to use them differently, and the hint on screen says exactly how: “Pop the firefly bubbles: the fireflies fly to the boss and break the spell!”
Fireflies do the work
In a boss room, firefly bubbles keep rising from the floor all by themselves, a new one about every two seconds, and never more than five at a time. Most of them start from a random spot along the floor, so they spread across the room instead of bunching up in one corner. That way there’s always one within a short hop, wherever the boss has pushed you.
Pop one, and a single firefly wakes up and flies straight at the boss, faster than fireflies fly anywhere else in the game. Every firefly that reaches it takes one point off the bar at the top of the screen, labeled simply “Boss”, and adds 100 points to your score. Old Dandel needs eight. The boss after level 5 needs fourteen, and the last one needs twenty.
A boss that tells you what’s coming
A boss flies around the room on a diagonal, bouncing off the walls, and touching it hurts. Every few seconds it throws a fan of seeds at whichever fledgling is closest. Old Dandel starts with two seeds per throw.
We wanted every throw to be fair, so each one is announced. Just before it throws, the boss slows down to a quarter of its speed for a little over half a second, like it’s taking a breath. The seeds themselves are spread wide and fly slowly enough to slip between. If you watch the boss instead of the seeds, you’ll almost always see it coming.
Half health changes the mood
The boss also gets braver as the fight goes on. The more fireflies hit it, the faster it flies, up to almost twice its starting speed, and the sooner it throws again.
At half health it roars, the room shakes, and it starts calling helpers. They arrive two at a time, about every nine seconds, but only while fewer than four spirits are already in the room, so the screen never fills up. Old Dandel calls Stomplings, the little walking roots from the first levels. Its throws grow from two seeds to three, too.
Here’s our favorite part: helpers are ordinary spirits, so a bubble works on them just fine. And every helper you set free during a boss fight sends a firefly at the boss as well. The thing that makes the fight harder also hands you more ways to finish it.
The golden clock helps too, if one turns up. It freezes ordinary spirits, and it slows a boss to under a third of its speed while it stops throwing and calling for help.
No clock, no note
A few rules from the rest of the game step aside in a boss room. In an ordinary room, dusk falls if you take too long. In a boss fight it never does, so you can take your time and wait for the right firefly. There’s no golden note to find either. The fight is the whole room.
What happens at zero
When the last firefly lands, the gray scribble over the boss’s head bursts. Every helper still in the room is set free at once, the seeds in the air vanish, and the boss drifts to the middle of the room, laughing. Then it showers the room with fourteen of the Tree’s best treats, adds a big bonus to your score (10,000 points for Old Dandel), and floats up and away.
We never wanted a boss to be beaten. We wanted it to be woken up. So the end of every fight is a thank-you.
Try the first one
The first two levels of Tirralee are free, alone or with a friend on the same keyboard. When you reach Old Dandel, forget the seeds for a second, watch the floor, and pop the first golden bubble you can reach.
