I’ve been doing a major combat pass on Hollow, focused mostly on enemy variety, spell behavior, and boss encounters.
The later floors of the Black Reliquary had become far too repetitive, with some floors pulling from an extremely small enemy pool. That has been corrected, and the deeper dungeon now has access to a much larger mix of enemies and casters.
Enemy spell behavior is also getting another pass. Several magic attacks now behave more distinctly instead of relying on the same generic damage setup, and I’ve started integrating a new lightning effect for chain-lightning-style abilities so the effect can remain connected between moving targets.
The biggest work has been on the major bosses.
Ballard and the bosses on floors 8, 12, and 16 are being rebuilt around proper attack patterns, health-based phases, telegraphed abilities, recovery windows, and unique mechanics.
The goal is to make these fights challenging because of how the bosses fight, not simply because they have more health and damage.
The Floor 16 boss has also been redesigned away from its old shard-based encounter and is now a direct combat fight.
I’ve also moved much of the boss tuning into editable combat, visual, and audio profiles. That makes it much easier to adjust timing, effects, damage, ranges, and presentation directly while testing.
There is still tuning and Play Mode testing to do, especially around boss difficulty and late-game encounter density, but combat is already feeling noticeably better.
More soon.