Release v1.1 Announcement:

The standalone version of Boss Battles is not coming any time soon, not in 2022 or even 2023. We underestimated how much work it is to create a standalone multiplayer game in Unity. We plan to build a series of smaller side games to learn netcode and Unity and eventually work our way up to Boss Battles as a standalone game. We launched a website where you can follow the games we develop SD Games.

We have re-released Boss Battles to the Dota arcade and released a new version alongside it. More details on this are below. We will keep Boss Battles updated and maintained, but feature updates will be sporadic as we are working on other games at the same time. The plan is to do a content release every year, which might include new modes, bosses, classes, and balance changes.

To ensure the mod stays up as long as possible with minimal maintenance, we put a lot of effort into this version to ensure that when Valve changes the back-end APIs, the code base is more resilient.

Major updates:

Removed the in-game shop; you can no longer equip purchased skins. If anyone has purchased a hero skin and wants a refund, please direct message me on Discord, and we will get the refund processed. To make the code more resilient, we removed a lot of the frontend and non-game critical code that changes a lot whenever Valve does a major update.

Removed the custom hero selection screen. The mod now uses the standard dota hero selection screen. This has the side effect of having the Dota hero names for characters during selection. Once in-game, the heroes have the Boss Battles hero names such as Rylai, Blademaster etc.

There are now 7 bosses! We have added a very simple starting boss Primalbeast. We listened to a lot of feedback during the initial release and decided to add a very simple starting boss to help new players understand the game.

Solo mode! We changed up the modes and replaced Easy mode with Solo mode. In Solo mode, the bosses' health, damage and abilities have been scaled to work with one player. The modes are now:

• Solo (Balanced around a team of 1 player)
• Normal (Stay on the same boss when you wipe)
• Hard (Go back to the first boss when you wipe)

Each mode can be played with any number of players, but the leaderboard will prioritise solo players to the top of the solo leaderboard.

New Hero - Rat

Rat joins the ranks. Just before the release of v1.0, we had a hero that was nearly ready and fairly experimental. Rat won’t be everyone's cup of tea, as the playstyle is quite selfish and different to the other classes. If you have any feedback, the designer is on our discord @fabz.

Minor Updates

Lina's basic attack has been fixed, so you cannot move and cast.

Hero Changes

Nerif has been buffed and changed:

• Atonement damage has increased from 70 to 80.
• Redemption heal has increased from 150 to 170.
• Radiance heal has increased from 180 to 250.
• Grace damage increase buff has been increased from 5% to 7%.
• Grace now has two charges and no cooldown, charge restore time is 30 seconds.
• Grace healing has been reduced from 50% to 30%.
• Condemn damage has increased from 200 to 300.
• Condemn damage over time has increased from 80 to 90.
• Apotheosis duration has been increased from 10 to 12 seconds.
• Apotheosis movement speed buff has been increased from 30 to 40.

Rogue:

• Envenom when at max stacks in solo mode now grants a heal per second while you have Envenom stacks.

Boss changes:

Beastmaster:

• After the bear is killed and Beastmaster goes into phase 2. He now casts poison gather once and keeps the buff for the remainder of the fight.

Timbersaw:

• When Timber chains to the edge of the map he now fires saw blades for a fixed amount of time as well as adhering to the previous mechanic. After the fixed amount of time has elapsed he will reset back to the centre of the map.

Tinker:

• Simplified phase 2 by reducing the cooldown of his laser. Crystals and rocks now spawn closer to the centre of the arena. Removed a bunch of mechanics from phase 2. The idea is that phase 2 should be a fast rush to kill him before the team runs out of crystals and rocks to hide behind.

Reflecting and roadmap

It's been 30+ days since the release of Boss Battles. In this post, we will share how the release went and what our plans are going forward. The team were so happy with the launch that we couldn't have asked for a better one! Special thanks to PIka, Echo and Bulldog, for playing the game on Twitch. It helped improve the discoverability of our game. We closely followed the players' progression over the launch weekend and listened to feedback. We noticed that the existing normal mode was too challenging and decided to implement a new mode and redefine the existing modes. This led to teams speedrunning the new easier normal mode and attempting the raid with less than four players.

What's next?

The team has started to design the next raid: Return of the Grand Magus. We plan for this raid to contain at least five new heroes and six new bosses. We are planning to release Return of the Grand Magus in 2022 as a standalone game. We decided that the best way for Boss Battles to grow and find its market is to develop the game outside of the Dota ecosystem. One of the biggest challenges we need to solve is the 'pugability' of the game. We will most likely develop an LFG system in the game. If anyone has feedback regarding the LFG system, please reach out! Also, we have a bunch of ideas for additional modes but haven't decided on anything. If you have an idea for a new mode please let us know by contacting Stefan or posting in the #suggestions channel!

Stay informed

Sign up to our mailing list, join our discord and continue to visit this website for the latest updates and progress on the Boss Battles game.

We want your feedback!

e will do our best to fix bugs and support the current raid; please keep reporting any issues and providing feedback on our discord. Thanks to those who have already, your feedback has been valuable. Thank you for all your support!