This time of year is happening to me! That’s my short explanation as to why I’ve had to condense progress from September and October into one post.
I’ve been building the last large core-element of the game world: Boss levels. There’s so much that goes into this relatively-new part of the game, that it takes a lot of development to get it all synergistic and refined enough to show anything.
The “boss levels” in Nectira are called Yarku Spires. They are organic floating towers, a menace to each island that Nectira will visit. She will ultimately have to destroy each to redeem Raeos from the Yarku invaders, whom have made Raeos a desolate clean-slate for their colonization.
Each spire will be a series of “rooms” as Nectira travels up to fight the Yarku Prince at the top. Each room will be filled with all sorts of dangerous growths and appendages that work like traps, destructible turrets and various creepy obstacles.
There’s a lot that will change, hopefully, but here is a screen shoot of a rough room build; just throwing down some instances of each object in their current state:
CLICK/TAP picture to see it all big and crispy!
So far I’m pleasantly surprised by how much the available spire elements make these levels sort of a difficult, twitch-reflex-puzzle. By scanning the next few steps and any obstacles ahead, you can skillfully cover some ground, inching your way to the end of each level, also against the tide of Yarku units and creeping toxic fog. Eventually, you’ll be able to commandeer exposed patches of ground “fur”, where you can plant your own traps (or to-be-announced “helpers”) to help you fight back. It’s gunna be so fun!
By my standards it’s ugly, broken, and missing 1/2 of the elements I want to have in there, but things are on track so far!
Here’s a short little video of me trying to beat the rough level above (I forgot I was recording, so excuse the sloppy test-play):
September – November is me trying to complete enough pieces of the spire levels to make something solid… a few dozen times, to eventually populate each spire with a mix of fun and challenging levels. Maybe I’ll even get to dig into the first boss in November – December, but we’ll see…
I’ll definitely share the more-refined spire development in a few weeks. Until then!