Patreon Weekly #10 - August 10th 2019

Hey Patrons!

0.7.4b is now out of beta, which means I can finally stop talking about LibGDX and get on with more content! This week I'm going to talk about some changes I have planned for Tengu.

Tengu is the only boss I've ever fully reworked, and I got some fairly mixed results when I did so. 0.7.5 is a nice opportunity to revisit this boss and give reworking Tengu a second try.

Before giving details I want to make it clear that this is all still in the concepting phase. I have yet to fully design or playtest any of these things, and so they may change significantly!

- Firstly, I am planning on ditching the maze in the second phase of the Tengu boss fight. I still think mazes are super cool, but just planting one in the middle of a boss fight was a mistake. The maze feels very mysterious and works well the very first time people fight Tengu, but after that all it does is put this empty lull in the action in the middle of a boss fight.

- I'm also looking to make the arenas more interesting for the first and third phase. While I don't have a specific plan here yet, I will probably enlarge the first arena slightly, and shrink the last arena significantly. Having some amount of chasing Tengu is good, but the current 3rd phase takes far too long, and puts no pressure on the player at all while searching for Tengu.

As for new things being added, so far I have come up with a few fairly solid new abilities Tengu may have:

- Tengu currently places traps in the first phase of his fight, but they aren't really very interesting. Tengu essentially makes some areas into no-walk zones, and occasionally that makes reaching him awkward. My plan is to give him a new ability: placing fading traps. Rather than traps constantly stacking, Tengu will clear the area and place fresh traps each time he jumps. These traps will appear briefly, and then fade away. The hero won't avoid these hidden traps, so its up to the player to remember where they are and walk around them to reach Tengu.

- Hidden traps make the first stage of the fight much more engaging, and give me an option for  a more interesting second phase as well. The second phase might involve the player having to navigate around small mazes of fading traps. This allows me to retain a bit of the theme of the current stage 2 while making it a lot more interesting. Of course the size of these traps mazes would need to be carefully tuned so that getting around them isn't too easy or too hard.

- Lastly, in the third stage of the fight you may encounter some mirror images of Tengu. These clones would look very similar to Tengu, but will deal fake damage and will fade after being hit. There are several ways Tengu could use these clones to help him win a fight, but if he uses them aggressively I'll probably put in some sort of visual tell so that the player isn't left just guessing which Tengu is real.

All in all I hope to keep the very core theme of the Tengu fight similar, but rework some annoyances and add a few more mechanics to make the fight more engaging and less tedious.