preview: Forest Boss battle animations, devlog (Patreon)

Work on the boss fight is moving along nicely, and I'm confident on a patreon release with this boss fight completed around the 16th of this month.

As this is the first boss fight in the game, it required a lot of work "under the hood" to get it going. Some of those additions:

• I've implemented an event system where when the player reaches a certain area/spot in the stage, I can then play sort of a cutscene by controlling the camera movement, displaying dialogue etc. When the player reaches the boss area, there is a small event like this before the fight.
• Defined a baseline for boss behavior. This basically means that now I have the framework for boss fights where I can control which skills a boss has, how often they use it and in which order, that kinda of stuff.
• Other general stuff about the boss encounter: creating the area where the fight happens, wiring the reward that appears after the boss is defeated, creating the UI for the boss fight, updating the game flags properly and opening up new areas, etc.

The good thing is that now with those things implemented, work on the next bosses will proceed faster. With the event system it also means that I'll begin putting events spread throughout the game to progress the story.