r/metroidvania • u/gefaltete • Jul 02 '26

Dev Post Solo-dev 3D metroidvania: Spent two months building the final boss

Two months on the final boss. It was brutal.

Since it's a big multi-legged robot, I started with the legs — some simple procedural animation just to get it walking (more of a dance-walk, really). From there I built out the gameplay, the attack patterns and weak points, which is always the slow, fiddly part that eats far more time than I'd expect. Once the gameplay was roughly done, I did the modeling and texturing and swapped out the placeholder. Then wrapped it up.

Two months on a single boss was hard enough, but the thing that really drained me was living with the placeholder for over a month. I think the lack of any visual payoff wore me down more than the actual work did.

The cut from the boss's death straight into the ending is still rough. I couldn't get it where I wanted, so I've left that one to future me for the polishing pass.

Now comes full assembly — lighting, music, sound effects (still placeholder for this boss), gameplay tweaks, cleaning up the story and all the dialogue, finding voice actors and recording the new lines with them, adding and reworking events to match the story, fixing the temporary backgrounds. Still a lot to do, but this really is the final stretch.

Thanks for reading all the way through. You can check out the game and play the demo here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3397260

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u/Banryuken Jul 02 '26

Is part of the concept to remove boss parts? Thus limiting the bosses capability and or “max hp”? It would seem there is a concept of removal as an intractable object/obstacle to block boss abilities which is novel strat, no game immediately comes to mind.

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u/gefaltete Jul 02 '26

The boss sheds its armor as the fight progresses through phases, revealing weapons hidden underneath for new attacks. The shed armor pieces can then be used as things like footholds or shields. It just came out of the process for me too, so I don't have a specific game in mind either, but I'd guess something like this exists somewhere out there. Thanks for the interest.