Hello everyone!

A bit of a different update this time. I've been focusing on bosses this past week. I've got a few in various stages of development, vague ideas, paper designs, actual implementation etc. The short term goal right now is to get at least 3 bosses in every zone. So this means each of the Branch-1 and Branch-2 zones needs at least one more boss. I'm also reworking a number of the older, simpler boss fights along the way.

Half way through some of the implementation, while doing a bunch of testing of the fights I suddenly realized that last updates Danger School suddenly gives us an amazing avenue for testing this sort of content. In the past, I'd test and balance these fights myself and then drop them into the main game at which point you guys would maybe encounter them once every 10 games or so and barely be able to give any meaningful feedback.

So instead with this 'update' I'm adding a new 'Test Levels' course to the Danger School where I'll be dropping boss fights as I get them implemented. My hope is we can all take a few runs through each fight with a number of different characters and really rapidly iterate and refine these fights before dropping them into the main game. So I'm treating this update as a 'rolling update' where every few days I'll add a new boss and tweak existing bosses based on feedback. The goal is that a few weeks of this should easily get us the 6 new bosses we need as well as reworking some of the old ones.

You can post your feedback on bosses here in this update thread or else there will be dedicated threads on Discord in the Focused-Feedback forum for each of the bosses. I'll continue to update this post with new bosses which will be released every few days as numbered 'hot-fixes'.

Danger School Updates

I've slightly changed the structure of the Course.js files so that we can include some new properties. I've updated the ExampleCourse.js file to reflect these changes. If your working on a course you will need to restructure it to fit this new format. I'd also highly advice keeping backups of your work outside of the Course folder for when I inevitably break something :P

• Courses now have a niceName property so that you can format the names with spaces and numbers.
• Courses also now include an author and description property for when we start passing these around.
• Lessons now include the same niceName property
• Lessons now include a 'hint' property where you can include a… hint that will only show up after the player has failed once and clicked the hint button.
• I'm creating a bunch of dummy characters at various levels to test the boss fights and courses can now give the player the option to choose one of these characters.

Danger School Submissions

For players who have created courses that they'd like to submit and have hosted as part of the base game I figured I should create some kind of basic user agreement for how this would work. I highly doubt this counts as a legal agreement but at least we have something concrete to point to. Just message me on Discord if you have something you'd like to see added to the game.

[*]You retain full ownership of the content you create and can ask to have it removed from the game at any time including after final release.
[*]Whatever name you put in the author field will be shown in game so your work will be attributed to you.
[*]You cannot claim any ownership over the rest of the game i.e. you can't show up years later and demand some percentage of game sales.
[*]I can change or remove your work at anytime in the future. I'd obviously prefer to let you edit your own work and resubmit it but this covers the case where something breaks in the future and I can't get a hold of you.

Bright Shadow the Construct

A totally new boss for The-Core. The main idea is that this should be a fight centered around kiting and controlling the bosses movement.

• A big chunky tank: Slow, High-HP, Protection and Heals in Lava.
• Very dangerous melee: High damage and Grab (constrict)
• Stomp: he stomps and creates a line of lava towards the player. Over the course of the fight he will cut up the arena with these lava lines which restricts the players movement and obviously he will heal in this lava.
• Animate Statues: there are a bunch of inert statues around the level that will animate into Obsidian Golems if the boss comes within melee range of them. They will revert to inert state if the boss and golem get more than 2 tiles apart.

The Efreeti Lord

A total rework of this boss fight. Implementing some brand new NPC-Controller code that I'll be adding to a number of different boss fights in order to add phases/states to boss fights. This is a super common feature in boss fights in other games. Instead of having a single ability set we can now create different states each with its own abilities and potentially different behaviors, properties, sprites etc. The boss can then cycle through these states, change states at different HP % or even perhaps different situations could trigger special state changes. Lots of things that could be done with this system in the future.

• State #1: Summoning Flame-Vortex for about 5T
• State #2: Summoning expanding flames all over the level for about 5T
• State #3: Summons a Flaming-Battle-Sphere with very low HP but high range/DMG (1T)
• He has a chance to Escape-Blink and reposition at every state change.
• Most of his states he can also use his basic fire projectile attack.