The Waking Fossil boss has been released for about two days, and I've gotten some great feedback about the fight being tough-but-fair (as hoped and designed for!) and fun even to lose to (doubly hoped!).

However, even if people are having fun dying over and over, I thought I would dial down the difficulty a little bit - both because it was a bit on the rough side, and to make the overall battle feel more balanced. A few tweaks will make some elements of the fight straight-up easier, but there are also some general pacing adjustments to take the overall experience higher.

I've also done some minor other tweaks, including a few embarassing misses from having content tunnel vision! Updated in the new build. And, y'know, I may have thrown in some other stuff.

If you're still having trouble, there's been lots of great tips posted on our Discord community!

(PS - if you enjoyed this boss and the game but haven't taken a look yet, we're 124% funded on Kickstarter and just short of a secret community reward goal!)

Changelog, update 0.1.08d:

• Waking Fossil
  • Health dropped from 325 to 300, and phase percentage brackets adjusted.
    • The net effect of this is that the 25 hits are largely removed from Phase 2, meaning the least unique phase (2) is shortened and that the added speed of the early part of the fight leaves more walls for Phase 3, indirectly also making it a bit easier.
  • The boss will stop its 5th-phase self-destruction if you die just before winning - mechanically this doesn't change anything, but it stops rubbing salt in the wound.
  • Adjustments made to The Dreaded Phase 4:
    • Scant delay added after bomb attack sequence, specifically to prevent a charge coming at you before you've reacted to incoming bombs.
    • Spiral attack's bullets now always move in a straight line (previously, they randomly alternated between arcing and straight movement, but they were fast enough that it was too hard to register which and felt unfair).
    • Mid-sequence spiral attack changed from 13 to 5 blasts to match the Phase 5 burst timing. The beginning-of-phase one-off spiral attack is still 48 shots. This means shorter immunity sections, and having to only juggle one 'rotation' of bullets during this phase.
    • Added a very brief "catching breath" state to give a moment's breather here and there. It's weighted at a low chance to cycle in so that it will generally be uncommon.
    • (can you tell Phase 4 was disproportionately hard? perfectly doable - but not in step with the rest of the fight. if I ever do a "hard mode" variant of bosses, expect some of these changes to unchange, though...)
• Misc bugfixes and clean-up
  • Fixed configuration error that caused Grinbles to count as a collider during Waking Fossil fight.
    
  • Fixed bug where player iframe time was linked to framerate; correctly desync'd now.
    
  • Player iframes updated from 0.75 seconds to 1.5 seconds (actually was in the last build). I'll be adding an assist slider for this eventually.
    
  • A little bit of optimization - not much, that mostly needs time I'll give to the full game, but a little.
  • Updated some out of date text talking about "just one boss" in the demo, whoops.
    
  • I can now add new events without needing to break old save files, woohoo!
  • I can also now add, change, or cut lore entries without needing to break save compatibility as well!
  • There's a bug I haven't caught yet that occasionally causes the boss to miss a cue after a jump ends and 'stand still' until the next phase change interrupt. It's something to do with the greater gravitics system, and I think is also the reason that mobs which rely on landing for their own behaviours (notably, like the Trash Bandits) can end up standing in place. I'm still looking into it, but if I can't solve it in the next little bit, I'll jury rig some kind of observer function that watches for these kind of stalls to snap it back online. Since it's eluded me for this long, I'm considering refactoring the gravity code for the full game to be a little more consistent.
    
• Other
  • Hm...? ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐🌠 
  • New enemy variant added.
  • Slightly rearranged a few lore entries in the notebook, so a few sentences have been added to two of the shortest entries in the Rubble Ruins section to make them less sparse.
  • Renamed Magic Switch to Magic Pylon in the notebook. If you had Magic Switch unlocked before, you'll need to re-scry for Magic Pylon.
  • Lowered Ruins Ghoul's health from 5 to 4 Strata Blast hits. A little too beefy at the moment.
  • Added a mailbox in the Ruins.
  • Did some tweaks to event handling so that it's now very easy to time events to the beat of a background music track, no reason.

I'll be making some future tweaks to improve telegraphing, so that it's clear the boss is immune to damage during one attack; likely I'll have some kind of lock imagery on the health bar itself and maybe some other visuals. It's a lot easier to dodge said attack when you aren't worried about counterattacking, but it's not clear enough that that's the case yet. The same system will be applied to Little Lord's mid-fight immunity attack when it's in place - although not to their deflect attack, as that will be breakable with the right spell later in the full game.

(...And then at some point I should really update the main game page here on itch to note that it's funded, huh? Yeah...)

Til next time!

Jake