After many tweaks, third Buginis boss fight is now in the game! It is based upon Murderswarm design by TIC. We have let ourselves experiment with it a bit and we feel that it is going to be yet another unique boss fight.

The boss fight implementation differs from original by being Buginis, rather than Vagorian breed. On paper, swarm-based AI might sound easy to do, but it required quite a bit of tweaking to get it somewhat right in the game. It turned out alright and we are pretty happy with the result - the Swarm behaves believably in confined arena and is a threat to the player.

While tweaking and improving Swarm's behavior we saw potential of using the same method of control for friendly Siphos in Aquarium. Smaller Siphos would follow larger ones, including player's Sipho, which would have some influence upon the rest of the Swam. That would turn into a herd-management minigame if you want to keep your own Swarm together and fight other Siphos. These Aquarium improvements would come after we finish with non-linear levels in 0.7 versions.

Version 0.7.4f1

• Less error prone way of applying zoom to view margins
  
• Reduce duration for camera animation if there is no spawn animation
  
• Use boss battle zoomout for other bosses
  
• Allow overriding zoom level for camera follow. Use zoom overrides for boss battle initial camera animation
  
• Swarm AI and arena improvements
  
• Add Buginis Boss 3 Swarm Layouts
  
• Do not save game while boss fight has not ended yet. Deterministically select zooid unlock drops
  
• More appropriate way of saving Boss Battle state
  
• WIP Buginis swam boss - swap arena art to Buginis environment, boid movement improvements, spawn swam from destroted eggs
  
• Add Destructible Sipho Container which spawns Siphos upon destruction
  
• Add HUE shift property to environment shader
  
• Add test for finding duplicate Environment Object IDs and fix them
  
• Swarmer Boid AI is now Faction based - boids will follow anyone in their faction
  
• Add Intended Rotation property to Siphonophore
  
• Update Siphonophore physical radius each frame instead of on Structure change
  

• Use automatic Graphics API for MacOS
  
• Move LUTs to Textures directory out of PostProcessing
  
• Show Builtin layouts first if there are no manually saved layouts in Layout Browser
  
• Rename few particles options
  
• Re-gather shader
  
• WIP Buginis boss
  
• Add some particle graphics options
  
• Remove two unused texture lookups in whirlpool mist shader
  
• Choose another enemy spawner layout if enemy spawner fails to spawn in 100 tries
  
• Increase level end timeout to 30 minutes