Well, I got there in time for Christmas (just)! The last boss is finally done, bar some polishing and tweaking of difficulty, and I’m extremely glad to have put this one to bed.

I ended up pulling out quite a few of the stops for this one (it’s the final boss after all) so there’s five/six separate stages to the fight and multiple different attacks and animations within each phase. The audio alone took around two solid days.

So here’s a description of each stage of the battle – I ended up switching the first stage (as described in my previous post) to stage two.

Stage One – Claws
In the first stage the Octopoid has grabby, snappy claws at the end of its tentacles which it lashes out at the player to cause large amounts of damage. It also has a secondary attack where it stops to fire mini black holes from its claws. I’m not entirely happy with the look of these mini black holes yet, that something I’m going to come back to.

The Octopoid moves pretty fast at this stage, and if you let yourself become entangled in its tentacles it can be pretty hard to break free!

To complete the stage the player has to destroy each claw – when a claw has taken a certain amount of damage it breaks off and falls to the ground. The rest of the boss is invulnerable to damage.

Stage Two – Dive Bomb / Black Holes
I wrote about this stage in the previous post so won’t go over it again here. It made sense to have the stage second as a) I thought it would look weird if the boss suddenly sprouted claws, and b) As the player is shooting at the boss’s mouth tentacles to cause damage it makes sense to have these destroyed at the end of the stage and I wanted the Cthulhu tentacles in play as long as possible!

Stage Three – Lasers
With its mouth tentacles destroyed, the Octopoid’s gnashing teeth are revealed and it begins to fire lasers at the player from the end of its tentacles. It moves pretty erratically in this stage as if it’s somewhat out of control.

To complete the stage the player must destroy each tentacle (once the end of a tentacle has taken a certain amount of damage the entire tentacle self-destructs). When each tentacle is destroyed the boss goes into a crazy spin which can be devastating to the player if they’re too close.

Stage Four – Dropping Squockets
By this stage the Octopoid is looking rather the worse for wear as it has lost all it’s tentacles. It still has plenty of fight left in it though! Its two attacks in this stage are a ram attack where it simply launches itself at the player, and the ability to spit out bubbles contain mini squocket enemies. These mini squockets are armed with rocket harpoons which they will launch at the player given the opportunity.

To complete this stage the player must keep ducking behind the boss and deal damage to its bulbous cranium. The front of the boss is invulnerable to weapons.

Stage Five – Phase Inversion
This stage is really an extension to stage four. The octopoid has lost half its skull by now, leaving its brain dangerously exposed. It still launches itself at the player in a ram attack but also spits out antimatter ‘ink’ based on the ‘Black Hole Blaster‘ weapon (which is probably going to be renamed the Phase Inverter but I’m not 100% decided on that yet).

Of course it’s the exposed brain that takes damage here and enables the player to move onto the final stage of the battle…

Stage Six – Skull Spin
There’s not much left of the Octopoid by now so it launches itself at the player in a fast and ferocious spinning attack whilst spitting out black holes as per stage two. If the player doesn’t keep moving here they will come a cropper pretty quickly as they’ll get sucked into a black hole and battered to kingdom come by what little the boss has left!

All the boss is vulnerable to damage now and, for added drama, I had it lose each eye and then its teeth as the player gradually pounds it into oblivion. Hopefully this makes for a fitting end to an epic battle!

I’ll be tweaking the difficulty of each stage considerably when I get to balancing the weapons and difficulty across the game (the next thing I’ll be working on) – I’ve nerfed the boss’s abilities quite considerably in the video so I could compress the whole battle into a reasonable space of time! Also this video (like most of them) has been blown up 150% as my computer is incapable of capturing 1280*720 at 60fps – it struggles even at this resolution. The rotations particularly look much better at the proper resolution. I need to find a solution to this for when I create my ‘proper’ promo reel.

Dev Time: 10 days (so that’s 19 days in total for this boss – groan)!
Total Dev Time: approx 237 days