Since my last update, I’ve mostly still been in design and planning land. One of the big open questions on my mind was boss fights. I was never happy with the way Eldritch referenced incredible beings like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and Dagon, but then just presented them as orbs to collect. But boss fights are notoriously difficult to do well in open-ended games like immersive sims, and the premise of a lone human going toe-to-toe with a Great Old One or Outer God is silly. My solution to reconcile all of this is probably equally silly, but I think it fits the tone of the game:
Bosses aren’t fights, they’re dungeons: dark and claustrophobic challenges in the literal belly of the beast. I’ll have to see if this solution holds up in execution, but it worked for Breath of the Wild‘s Divine Beasts. And it gives me a place to do some gross flesh dungeons, and I love me a good gross flesh dungeon.
Beyond planning, I made some steady progress on my task/bug backlog:
- Fixed teleports failing when destination is blocked by a colliding entity
- Ensured the hub level always regenerates if the build number changes
- Added above/below indicators to minimap markers
- Fixed AIs not being able to climb onto sloped roofs
- Made the intro logo skippable
Finally, I experimented with a couple of ways to populate outdoor spaces with small buildings. My first attempt—repurposing dungeon rooms in containing buildings—didn’t work out for a lot of reasons. So instead I just used the “furnish rooms” feature I had already developed to fill empty outdoor space, and made larger tiles with small buildings on them. So now I have a game where you can climb on top of buildings, which is all I’ve ever wanted to do.
