"Boss" Key & Secret

Inspired by Phaser Cat’s blog post, I decided to also try my hand at implementing the Boss Key in my own game, EkoScape.

What is a Boss Key?

As you might have been tricked by the name, it’s not a special key to defeat the game’s boss, like a cheat code. Instead, it’s a key that you scramble to mash when your boss is rounding the corner, and the game quickly changes the scene to that of “work” 😉, like a bro that’s got your back.

However, it’s not only good for bosses! It could be for a nagging spouse, a pesky parent, or a spying spirit guide (I thought you were meditating!).

Implementation

I implemented it as the B key on the keyboard. I had to modify my scene manager code to allow persisting the state of a scene so that it would not reload the game scene after being used (and subsequently, starting you over from the beginning). Because of this, it also acts as a “pause” scene, killing two birds with one stone.

In addition, I had to change my audio player code to allow pausing & resuming, and then I tweaked the boss scene code to pause/resume the music when the boss key is pressed. This was a little challenging since I also have a key for toggling the music, so I needed additional logic to check if the music was playing before or during the boss scene.

Inspired by an American Pie movie where he uses a “Boring Work Stuff” folder to store some, um, “interesting” links, I named the image & scene boring_work.

On the main menu, you can see the boss toggle key described as “boss OMA.” Children look away now… It’s just a tongue-and-cheek acronym that stands for “boss on my ass.” Not intentional, but BOMA also sounds like Bulma from Dragon Ball to me.

I used ChatGPT to fill in the fake Excel data, as coming up with my own was kind of a pain and felt like work, ironically.

Secret?

Lastly, there is a secret key that you can press for something else interesting. To reveal this secret, if you choose to accept this mission, simply beat any map completely, by rescuing all of the Ekos and touching the spaceship at the end. Good luck!

As always, you can download & play the game here. Namaste!