The Swamp Boss: Mausolea

Someone once asked me who or what was "Mausolea", referring to the name of the stage (in the swamp area) called "Gardens of Mausolea". It is time to finally answer that question!

The visual theme of this new boss is that of a slime amalgamation, hive-mind kind of thing. You can see it as a sort of a slime queen, if you will. Staying true to its fantasy slime nature, it loves to jump and bounce around, therefore giving this fight a more vertical dynamic to it.

With this upcoming swamp boss, this means that all of the 8 areas of the game finally have a boss fight:

Beach: Forgotten Mariner
Forest: Young Mother
Hill: Gatekeeper
City: Champion
Underground: Werewolf and Witch
Castle: Princess
Swamp: Mausolea
Machine: Blue VIxen (technically an intermediary bonus boss)

Well of course we're still missing the final true last boss in the machine that is yet to come, which reminds me of a decision I made for this boss.

You see, initially my design plan for the boss of the swamp included the theme "big", as in, I wanted to create a boss that had a giant sprite of some sort. Mostly because I wanted to try my hand at making one of those, since my comfort zone is making smaller scale pixel sprites, and I want to challenge myself once in a while.

The keywords for one of the concepts that I had in mind was of a "Water-Dragon-Amphibian" or even "Loch Ness Monster". If you're familiar with pokemon, I would use visual references from a Lapras or even a Lugia, and Maya would essentially be fighting against this big and long dragon neck coming out of the water.

The other boss concept was that of a straight up giantess of some sort, perhaps even a mermaid like in that one Shantae game. Her huge torso is coming out from the background and Maya can only hit the giantess boobs or something to do damage.

But then I remembered that I had yet to design the final boss (to be encountered in the final chamber of the Deity Machine), and it just made more sense that, if I'm going to create a boss with a big sprite in my game, then it should be the last big bad of the game.

For the purpose of the story it will have to be a giantess, and therefore you can expect the final boss of the game to be something along those lines. Then ultimately I had to adapt the swamp boss to become the slime queen that you can see in the gif preview, which I'm happy to see how it turned out.

Best Regards,
Mega