Having done a bunch of enemies and refined the theme of the game a bit, I decided to tackle the first boss fight! I decided pretty quickly that I'd need to somehow pause the side scrolling and create some sort of arena in order to contain the fight, mainly because it seemed like it'd be a massive headache to deal with all of the scrolling and warping issues that would come up otherwise, but I also think it was the right call as it mixes up the gameplay style a bit, allowing the player to move more freely around the screen. To contextualise it, I came up with the 'Frame Trap'! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37042970/4284ae534802954181e90d897f550363bef15f96.gif[/img] The camera pulls out to reveal the black frame boundaries which also act as walls to keep the player trapped. I was really happy with this as it solved the game design problem and added to and reinforced the context of the game world. From here it was relatively easy - I came up with a few ideas for the kind of attacks the brush could do and set about implementing them with a spawning system that randomises the order they appear in. There's also a countdown to when the frame trap happens, so the player is able to get into a position where there are some health or energy resources to use during the fight. It's a fairly easy boss to defeat, but there's room to adapt the difficulty in the future when I get around to balancing the difficulty. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37042970/13e5a2200a08fe044049eac3837d05609ab2670b.gif[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37042970/ad05f02e4af34e8ae35cb15178a74a32ea9bf4a3.gif[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37042970/0d853ac82bad0993449261a833e25eb015726cdc.gif[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37042970/b134995bfe56f02ee7e3ff94c6810e89eb6b8db6.gif[/img] Around this time I was also playing with the idea of a mini map at the bottom of the screen which would indicate where health dots are and whether any of the dots had been popped or not (I was planning to make this scroll with the player, so that the green indicator (the player) would stay in the central position and the others move around that), but I ended up scrapping the idea as it was just too much info to be able to read while playing... [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37042970/72ed0dbec4f4b2cb0a567309733738281be7eb7c.gif[/img]