I might be kinda good at this game

Voladrome's event is now available!
Help her find keys to treasure vaults by doing several different minigames.

The music also layers each monster family's leitmotif based on the color of the attack currently happening. I had to redesign the music playing system just to allow for the multiple music layers in this battle.

Boss 107: Limbo
Now for the final Fallen Heart. This battle is very unique from the scoring mechanics to the background music. She has attacks based on all 6 monster families, and you get to choose the order they happen by breaking the corresponding color orbs.

Blizzard Veyeral was another boss from Eye Attack. The boss of the Ice Castle zone was a Veyeral that pops its pupils out. They bounce around bleeding everywhere as you try to hit them. The entire Ice Castle was turned into the fortress part of the battle.

Something I never brought up so far is just how much I like to make things gush blood everywhere! I couldn't really tell you why, but it's just so fun for me. To have this violence in such a wholesome and loving game is just so raw. I'll need a youtube essay to explain to me what I meant by this.

This battle began as a rage battle where the bubbles would appear and move with the fortress, but that proved too difficult to balance and generate in a fair way. After I made all the wrathful variants of all bosses, I got the idea to make the bubble stay still, so I added it back in permanently.

Boss 106: Blizzard Veyeral
I was fine with Veyerals having 1 less common battle than all the other families, because they'll end up with the most final bosses anyways. But Veyerals having the shortest Tower by 1 battle just didn't feel right to me.

Any excuse to cram in another Fortress Battle!

You can hear the music transition in this clip.

Soon after this, I added an alternate starting point to nearly 30 of the battle tracks. These songs will alternate starting positions if you hear the same song repeatedly during a run. I had to make multiple intro segments for all of these tracks!

The background music usually takes around 2 minutes to loop, but players will rarely take much longer than 1 minute to win fights. I wanted players to hear my favorite parts of tracks more often, so I made all the Fallen Hearts switch to those parts when you reach half their fear.

Boss 105: Violet
Now we get to arguably the most normal of the Fallen Hearts. This battle is the hybrid of Null and Shiny battles. I basically just swapped out Scarlet's rage bubbles for the raining void wall and called it a day. This fight literally took me a day to make.

What makes this Fortress Battle special is not only the shiny treasure bullets you can collect, but also the fact that Amber is present for the entire battle. In other Fortress Battles, the boss hides away until you reach phase 2.

Boss 104: Amber
By this point I had a label for this type of battle. These are now called Fortress Battles. I spent so much time on Ventra that I had to reuse all that work as many times as I could get away with!

The battle itself is rather simple, but this is one of the battles that I designed with a seemingly impossible optimal score. Explaining why would take many posts, but the takeaway is that I design some battles as a scoring puzzle that the community can solve. I don't even know the answer myself.