Boss Discussion (2.1 vs 2.2, or just thoughts in general)

cookiefonster said:

I imagine that goop gimmicks, reworked or not, would make for a rather tedious boss.

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That largely depends on implementation. The main thing that makes the goop tedious within the acts is that if you undershoot a jump and don't have enough downward momentum to translate into a high enough upward bounce to recover from the mistake, you have to slowly wait for your character to recover while they slowly come to a stop so you can walk.

If the walkable platforms above the goop are low enough that this is never an issue, recovery from a bad jump becomes trivial. For example, the meat and potatoes of the boss could be that every time you hit Eggman, he activates a shield that you need to disable by going down into the goop and jumping upside down from platform to platform to trigger a power switch that turns off the power.

While they are surfaced, he fires bouncing balls of goop at the player that they can get stuck to or inside of that carry the player towards electrified ground. The player has a window of opportunity to escape by repeatedly pressing jump, so getting hit by a ball isn't instant damage. Successfully dodging the balls allows the player to get close enough to Eggman to land a hit.

Perhaps for the pinch phase, he forces the player to become grounded on the surface and locks them away from being able to submerge with a glass floor that retracts in or something. From here, it would play like it does now, complete with the electrified floors being disabled so that players don't accidentally hit the boss in such a way that knocks them backwards into them. The narrative could be that Eggman has given up restoring the power and is in his last ditch effort to prevent Sonic and friends from continuing onward to DSZ.

This would require the boss needing to take place in a room rather than something resembling a train car though, as otherwise it wouldn't make sense for the player to be able to submerge. Perhaps the setting could be the deepest core of the factory where the power core is, powering the entire facility. The goal the entire time having been to infiltrate to here to shut down the factory and liberate Techno Hill from Eggman's influence.

I saw it mentioned that Fang doesn't use stage gimmicks; that's untrue. He is the only boss pre-Black Eggman whose projectiles have incredible knockback, and that's because they're literally an airborne form of TNT - using identical explosion frames at a slightly smaller scale. Also, he is notably the first boss set over a death pit, in the zone where death pits are introduced in full force. Although I imagine there are those that would criticise this design choice, it was definitely intentional, ableit emphasised for the pinch only.

Anyways, that's enough out of me. Finding reading this topic interesting and don't want to derail it too much.