This boss for a videogame called "Realm of the Mad God" has been a personal project of mine for a long time. Although I didn't and do not currently develop the game, I saw it as an opportunity to create and design things within it. The game is known for its bullet-hell style gameplay, with bosses shooting so many projectiles, that the only way to survive is to dodge. It is an intricate dance of attacking the boss to progress the fight, but dodging bullets and projectiles to survive. 

Each boss fight has its own tricks, and patterns, causing the player to always adapt to get ever closer to defeating it. It is a beautiful design philosophy that leads to some of the most engaging and rewarding gameplay out there. 

Videogames can use these connections to their boss fights to convey emotions of intense magnitude. You can feel a crushing cosmic smallness, compared to the unfairly powerful boss. It can kill you if you make one mistake, yet it takes countless hits for you to even the score. Sometimes it just feels impossible, like it was designed to make you fail.

Yet, in spite of the insurmountable odds, it is possible. It can kill you a thousand times, but if you beat it once, you've beat it. Sure, you may have to fight it again later, but the fact that you can beat it at least once can keep you going. No matter how much it hurts you, no matter how many times you fail, you can always succeed at what you strive to do. 

And once you beat the boss, regardless of what in-game reward lies on the other end, the fact that you proved to yourself that you could do it is reward enough. 

It is this feeling I wish to share with future players. I want to create an insurmountable and powerful boss, because I want to see players rise from the ashes of their failed attempts, and to beat it.

Making a boss fight with a deep enough fight to invoke that feeling is incredibly difficult. There are countless boss fights out there that have tried nearly everything, so creating a completely new one is nigh impossible, but I can try my best to make it as intricate and deep as possible. I can design the fight in such a way to incentivize cooperative team play, or playing solo, or playing a certain class a certain way. The rabbit hole of self improvement is infinite, and thus the rabbit hole of a boss fight is infinite.

So, what did I do in regards to this boss fight design? 
Well, I made everything.
     - I scoured sprite sheets of bosses from Realm of the Mad God, studied the technology and math behind the projectiles of the game, and drew and wrote an unfathomably large amount of content.
     - I created several projectiles, some of them animated, some of them on different canvas sizes to render in-game in different ways. 
     - I manipulated the game engine itself to find what was and wasn't possible, innovating new projectile trajectories only using technology already in the game, or in development.

Although incomplete, Void Oryx is inching ever closer to reality.

The process has been a lot like a boss fight. Countless iterations, hundreds of hours refining, over and over and over again. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I am happy to see the future, and what lies beyond.