Yesterday's change made every boss 4 to 8 times a player's height and took 10 percent off their life. Today's work was finding out what else grew with them.
A reach that scaled with the body
The first guardian is where a new player meets a boss. After the size change a background Watch run, which plays as a level 1 Knight, showed he had become far too deadly. The cause was simple: his melee reach was tied to his body scale, so a bigger body meant a longer arm. His reach had grown to about 4.8 m.
The fix went through three rounds, each measured the same way:
| Build | Change | Fights the Knight lost to the first guardian |
|---|---|---|
| Before the size change | none | 1 of 6 (17%) |
| 6.66.30 | bigger body, reach scaled with it | 14 of 30 |
| 6.66.31 | reach capped at 3x scale, guardian damage cut 20% (3.0 to 2.4) | 5 of 12 |
| 6.66.32 | reach follows size only up to 2x, the strike zone he had before | 6 of 20 (30%) |
The last round also thinned the horde that trickles in while a guardian is alive, to 0.3 of the live enemy cap from 0.4. The body is as large as intended, but the blow no longer stretches with it.
Fewer enemies on screen had a side effect. Frame-rate dips under 25 fps went from 9 events in 30 minutes to 1.
30 percent is better than 14 of 30, and it is still not back to the old 17 percent. The sample sizes are small, and the Watch AI is a middling player, so these are its numbers rather than a human's. In the same run it never cleared Level 1 in 20 attempts, with 8 of 19 deaths in the second chamber.
Eight new enemy bodies
Eight new enemy bodies went in, one for each of eight areas. A visual pass rendered each and rebuilt them, fixing roughly 50 faults between them. A few examples of what that pass catches: a boulder that read as fur, a bell that looked like a dunce cap, a cobra hood floating off the head. Cuts and explosions work the same way as before because every body still keeps the base skeleton in front. The last edits to three of the eight were not re-rendered, so those still need an eye on them.
Sound and shading
The classes have new sounds: bow twang, arrow hit, axe whirl, katana, nunchuck, spear and a great boom. The shading lost its last dither patterns, so there is no stipple and no grain anywhere.
Most of this is built and build-checked rather than play-tested.