I updated the design for the hovertank boss because I wasn’t satisfied with the original one. Plus I think this one will suit the factory levels better, since they’re gonna be quite gray. It looks pretty damn cool in motion!
I also started playing around with filters in Starling. A 16-bit mode is something I’ve always wanted to add to my games, and it turns out I can do it with just one line of code. Hurray!

Here’s the source for the filter, btw.

In motion you can tell it’s a filter, but it still looks pretty good. In screenshots it looks almost legit. It doesn’t seem to have a huge effect on performance (or at least not on my computer), so I’ll leave it in as a bonus feature.

I think this is my favorite boss so far. The way she(?) moves around ended up looking pretty cool. Her theme is fast movement and honeycomb shields!

Adding in the honeycombs makes me see how much better the game will look once I draw proper backgrounds. Oh, and the honeycombs are there to punish you for spraying bullets, and they change up the gameplay quite a bit. I might actually go back and add some bubbles to the turtle boss.

The Protector’s theme is… maze-like patterns!
His walking animation is also programmed kind of cool. The animation’s speed depends on how fast he’s moving, and can even be reversed.

Also, HFX posted a preview of the first boss theme: http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/586743

This boss has been pretty fun to work on.
The satellites make it really easy to come up with interesting patterns.

He’s also quite interesting to fight, because how you take out the satellites is up to you.
You get points for time, so concentrating on attacking the body will usually get you the most points, but will also be the hardest approach.

The turtle’s theme is bullets that spawn on or bounce off the edges of the screen. So most of the patterns don’t look particularly impressive, but they’re still challenging.

For each boss’s last pattern I’m sticking in a super-dense graze-fest. Bigger bullets are worth more points!

Btw, all of my screenshots are on Heavenly difficulty.
Casual difficulty is about 25% density, Hard is 50%, and Heavenly is 100%.