TheDaneOf5683

I'm interested in the thought process behind end bosses in your games.

Spacechem has these wild, often infuriating end bosses to each node and while I kind of hated them, they were also some of my most memorable expeiences with the game. They were stripped from the iPad release to, I had presumed, keep filesize down (?). So I was able to finish all the levels on iPad, but I'm still on Flidais on the PC. I kind of love that.

Infinifactory is one of my favourite games, all time. But it had no end bosses. I only made it through maybe nine levels of Shenzhen I/O (I'm more capable with visual programming than the kind that uses words, apparently, but I didn't see any hint of end bosses there either.) And now with Opus Magnum, I'm nearing the end of the fifth stage and I've not seen any end bosses.

Which is fine. I don't think the games suffer probably from the absence of things like that. I'm more interested in:

[QUESTION] Why have you not gone back to the end boss well? Did you not like how they worked in your games or how players reacted to them? Did they just not fit with your newer games? Do you hate them now?

Because man... Quororque, the defiler-alchemist is one of my favourite videogame encounters of all time.

Oh man you're right! I did play through Infinifactory to 100%. I just looked it up and now I remember that level. It was a blast. And you're right, hard in a way completely different from other levels.

And yeah to point 4, the micro vs the macro of those levels never actually made much real-world sense, but I always gave into as one of the charms of the medium.

Thanks for the answer.

We didn't realize that the boss levels in SpaceChem were... questionable... until quite a while after release.

Funny thing is that while I loved the boss levels in SpaceChem (Quororque!), I was so happy they weren't included in the iPad version. That meant I could finally get at (and solve) the puzzles on the Flidais. Prior to that, I kept getting muddled on the meteorite assault at the end of Atropos Station.