A preview of the new boss.

The next update of the project might be bringing a new boss for you to face.

I decided to showcase it to remove some dust from my Youtube account. And also from this blog.

The boss fight was actually quite complicated to make, and I don't mean only AI wise.

Let's start with the boss.

The boss can end up absorbing victims inside his body. A good number of his skills can end up causing the characters affected by it, to be stuck inside its body for some time. One of the skills is the Body Slam.

I had to make a system where not only the victim is seen trapped inside the boss, but also depending on his animations, they are shown about in the correct place for the frame, make the characters faced direction change, and also downscale them to kind of fit inside his body.

And some skills make use of the victims trapped inside him, like the Feast skills, which drain life from characters trapped inside to restore the boss health, and the Hurl Foe, which launches a trapped victim on another target.

Due to the possibility of him having the victims trapped for way too long, I added a skill where he expels trapped characters from his body, if passes a long time with them trapped inside him. The delay before expelling characters is reduced if he's not attacking anything.

Another characteristic, is that the boss is really talkative. If you pay attention to what he's saying, you might have an idea of what he's about to try next. Sadly, there's a few cases where an attack is unavoidable, but others, the information is really handy.

And, is the first boss to invoke summons. Those summons attacks the target of the summoner (I might need to change that). I had to disable their loot, because could end up making the boss very convenient.

As for the scene and the boss fight,they all happen in the same dialogue.

I had to add new dialogue step types in order to support not only characters spawning, making them passive (so we can have a cutscene), move, and more.

The boss fight itself still happens inside the dialogue system.

I thought it would be really annoying to battle the boss with field monsters wandering around, so I also moved the player to "another dimension" while the dialogue is happening. I believe I might need to revert that in the future, and make the player group be unattackable during the scene.

In the case of this boss fight, you'll have the help of npcs, that will help you do damage on the boss. The npcs have their own AI and skills that they will use in combat, so they will be handy when facing the boss. Do not leave them facing the boss alone. You've been warned.

There is the addition of Urgent Quests on the Bounty Board system, which will feature the quest to face this boss. The Urgent Quests are not affected by the overtime randomly picked quests of the normal bounties list, and will always be disponible, if the quest is not in cooldown (if you completed it previously), and you can take the quest (all its requirements are met).

It's planned that the quest to face Gelking can be taken during Tuesdays, Thusdays and Saturdays of real life time. The quest itself has a cooldown of 1 day, so the next day the quest is active, you'll be able to take it.

Well, that's it for this post. I hope you guys give it a try on this boss fight once the update comes out.

See ya.