The setup is that you’ve entered the lair of Peter Thiel, or some copyright free stand in. He has a personal army of closeted looksmaxxing social media influencers at his beck and call, and flies around on some sort of futuristic jetpack – or maybe just a Segway, which would be ironic in a way I can’t quite wrap my head around. I considered giving him another stage where he sips on a cocktail made from virgin blood, as well as about a million other gags, but most of the jokes require a ton of artwork that I can’t produce right now, so flavour took a strong backseat to testing the gameplay premise.
I pretty much just copied a bunch of attacks from bosses in well-regarded shmups, modified them a bit, and shoved them into one boss. Then I supplemented with an existing enemy type. All in all, it turned out surprisingly well, and it’s nice to see that the fight is fun even in its tremendously unpolished state.
I’ve said before that shmup mechanics can’t be naively copied into a twin stick shooter, and that the main justification for the shmup style boss is simply that he’s a huge change of pace from the regular gameplay. That’s why I’ll only make one boss in this style, the rest being more like the other enemies in the game, only more powerful and complex.
