I did say I would be talking about Aquos as soon as I had the concept art for it but... That's not done yet and it doesn't make sense to keep it hidden so long so... here it goes.
Aquos is the boss that players will be facing in the Water Faculty. As expected, this place has to do with water and so does Aquos (figures, right?), so I thought of it as this sort of serpent-shaped watery creature that lurks through the pipes of the Water Faculty.
The initial premise I had for it was that I wanted players to feel hunted. I wanted Aquos to be this relentless and aggressive hunter that would forget about protecting itself for the sole purpose of shredding its enemies. I want this fight to be all about aggression from both players and the boss, both have to get into these high risk high reward situations if they want to beat their enemy. Also I wanted to make the fight as different as possible from The Eye, just to give a good sense of how far can the difference in bosses span.
It's made of water, it moves all the time, it's a single enemy, etc. You get the idea.
So, as for the fight itself, players will be moving around in these pipes that traverse the walls of the Faculty. These pipes are Aquos' domain, as they are what it uses to travel without being seen, so right off the bat, players are in this disadvantageous place. The pipes are pretty big, so they still have a lot of room to move around, but the problem is that Aquos is as big as the pipes, so in the case it is chasing after a player, this player has no other option but to run away from it, as there's nowhere else to go.
One interesting thought I wanted to apply for Aquos is the lack of "invinsibility periods" for the boss. When fighting a boss in a game, you usually have to stun them or something to be able to hit them in their weaks spot, and then when the stun is finished you can no longer hurt it until you go to the next cycle. And usually repeat this 3 times in order to beat it. I wanted to experiment with getting rid of it, and so I've made Aquos vulnerable to attacks *all the time*.
Aquos' weak spot is its core. This core in reality is Aquos itself, it's a magic orb that lets Aquos manipulate water in such a way that it can create its watery body. You can't actually hurt the body, you have to hit the core. So, for starters, the core is pretty hard to reach and has to be done pretty carefully.
One last thing for Aquos to be killable, is being able to stun it. I said it was always vulnerable, and that as long as the players hit the core, they would deal damage to it, but sadly it has way too much HP to just be killed like this, players have to stun it in order to be able to dish out consistent amounts of damage to eventually kill it.
To stun Aquos, a player has to hit the core with any kind of ability that knocksbacks, immobilizes, snare, etc. Any kind of crowd control skill will effectively stun Aquos. This may sound crazy (and I've yet to test how viable this actually is, but bear with me), but remember that hitting the core is the hard part here.
When Aquos becomes stunned, its body explodes and the core falls to the ground, where players can whack it as much as they want until the body reforms again. Players will need to find ways to stun Aquos and position themselves properly to do so. Because of this, the actual level design of the place where the boss fight occurs is super important, because it will dictate just how hard the fight will be, by providing players with vantage points to exploit Aquos' weakness.
Sadly we are still working on the layout of the level so I don't have much to show about it
... But what I can do is write a lot more text about what Aquos' does! Yes! Let's do that! On the next post
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