(Posted originally on our blog)
Hi everyone!

After a couple of weeks, we finally ended all mechanics required for the Medical area boss!

As usual, the Surgeon, will consist of the exact same mechanics as the enemies of the area but presented in a slightly different way or with a tiny notch of extra difficulty. The boss actual design is still in the works our designer already made a few awesome concept drawings that we will show as soon as we decide the direction we will take the boss, but for now, we have the basic behavior to show off. 

Overall the boss has 8 different base patterns:

Run To Pattern

The first movement pattern, its goal is to give the player some space or close into it, depending on where the player is regarding the boss. Super simple pattern.

Chase Pattern

In the second moving pattern, we have a simple chase pattern although it doesn't look like it, the speed is slightly inferior to the run pattern to avoid making it too hard to escape, but of course, all of it is configurable, so in later stages, we might decide to make it run faster. Its a bit dull right now but when the actual art and animation set it it will look a bit more menacing xD

Hit Pattern

The final building block to any boss on Oirbo, when you hit the boss it's important to have some way of preventing the player to hit the boss more than once in a single try, so this time we added some upper lasers and gave enough time for the player to escape.

Fire Laser 

With the entire area full of lasers we had to include some kind of laser attack in the boss, this one is just the simplest it has on its arsenal.

Fire Balls

Following the same reasoning as the Fire laser pattern, since one of the enemies in the area fire these balls we reused them for the boss, but instead of just one, the default attack fires 3 to the player position.

Fire Balls Arc

Instead of firing the balls directly to the player we fire them in an arc, it may seem the same pattern but the tiny displacement on the balls make them a lot hard to evade.

Laser that follows Player

The fire laser is a perfect intro pattern for the boss but as the stages advance it starts to display something more intricate, like these lasers that follow the player around the room.

Laser Room

Finally, the most complex pattern of the boss, where it simply sets the entire room full of lasers, on the gif there are still some gaps between the lasers, but on a later stage there won't be any, and we will force the player to go to the Astral section in order to avoid getting hit by them. 

When the room laser-pattern starts, it will unlock some of the room astral buttons to enable the player to go out and avoid any damage and with that, we force the player to use every single mechanic that she learned during the area in order to defeat the boss.

The best part is that these are simply the building blocks, we can now mix different patterns together in order to make the fight more exciting without it feeling too plain, next week we should have the boss fight all done and we will post quick gameplay of it on our social networks (and here) so don't forget to join us on  Discord, Twitter, and wishlist the Oirbo on  Steam, below the huge progress that we made regarding the medical area decoration.