--- DevDiary ---

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- 2024/04/20 -

This week, I finished working on Ilriss.

The experience of working on a boss like this has been soul-crushing, but now she is functional from beginning to end.

The three points of balance that have been tearing me apart during the development were the difficulty, the spectacle and the interactivity. What makes bosses like Ilriss fun, in my opinion, is the beautiful and mesmerizing circular patterns of their attacks - stripping them off reveals a rather dull encounter that asks the player to slighly move around dodging obstacles and to wait until the health of the boss reaches zero. In the case of Sunrise Doll, the rate at which the health of the boss drops depends on how well the player can reflect projectiles, which means that the patterns have to simultaneously be challenging to maneuver around and have reflectable parts that the player can approach and interact with.

One important thing that I always keep in mind is that I don't want to make the patterns seem manufactured to be interacted with. A lot of the times, even in widely acclaimed games, I find design choices that seem primed to lead the player towards the solution, which makes the experience feel artificial.

I do not know how difficult Ilriss is for a regular player of the game. My guess, after playtesting her over and over again, is that she, as she is right now, is a really sharp and sudden difficulty spike. I am not sure if I should make her easier, or double down on the difficulty, seeing that she is an important figure of the game. Likewise, I do not know how much of the difficulty may arise from the player failing to control Pawn the way they want, compared to them failing to interact with Ilriss' attacks.

Ilriss will not be a part of the Trial version of SDR - I plan to make her the end of the demo version of the game, if that ever becomes something I want to make. I am terribly relieved that she is finished, and that I have three more bosses to create.