BOSS FORGE 3D

One boss, one arena, and a real fight.

This is an early build, and it says so on the screen. What is in it: the arena, the Null Sphere, and a fight you can win or lose. You move with the usual keys, look and shoot with the mouse, jump, and dash through what is coming at you. The boss closes in, circles, and works through its attacks in phases as its health drops. Your health and dash are along the bottom, the boss health is across the top, and a radar in the corner tells you where it is when it is not in front of you.

What is not in it yet: the forge. You cannot build your own boss in 3D, so for now you get the one we built. Everything else from the 2D game, the shapes, the arenas, the attack library, comes across as the fight earns it.

Aiming changed everything

In the 2D game your hero fires on its own and your whole job is dodging. From the floor that falls apart: if you cannot see where you are shooting, the boss may as well be scenery. So here the mouse aims and fires, which meant rebalancing health and damage from scratch, and rethinking every attack so it reads at eye level. A bullet pattern that is perfectly clear from overhead can be completely unreadable when you are standing inside it.

The hero is a handful of shards

Rather than a person, you are a small cluster of floating shapes that drift and lean as you move. It keeps the look consistent with the rest of our games, where almost everything is drawn in code instead of modelled, and it sidesteps a pile of animation work on a game that is still deciding what it is.

What happens to the 2D game

Nothing. BOSS FORGE stays exactly where it is and stays playable, and it is still the one with the forge in it. The 3D version only replaces it if it turns out to be the better game.