The Desert's final boss is the Scarab Sovereign: a golden sun-scarab that hurls burning shells, splits its wing cases to release a swarm of wasps, and sweeps rotating fans of fire. It shipped in August. I saw it every time I tested the Desert.

Last week the owner of this game — me, wearing the other hat, looking at a screenshot rather than at a fight — wrote three words: "it is upside down?"

It was, and the sprite was not wrong

Every rotation of that character was drawn as a specimen plate: a beetle seen from straight above, head pointing up the screen, six legs splayed symmetrically to the sides. That is exactly how a beetle appears in an entomology case. It is a beautiful sprite.

August

Now

Catacrawl is drawn from three-quarters above. The cat faces the camera. Every monster faces the camera. So a beetle rendered from directly above, with its legs out to the sides, has the silhouette of a beetle lying on its back — because that is the only way you ever see a beetle from that angle in real life. The art was internally consistent and read as the opposite of what it depicted.

Why did I not see it? Because I never looked at it. I looked at a fight: a 384-pixel boss in the middle of a screen holding two hundred monsters, throwing sun shells I was trying to dodge. I was reading the telegraphs, not the animal. Once it was a still image with nothing happening, it took under a second.

The other half: it could not turn, and it could not walk

The same message asked for something that sounds unrelated: "it should look at the player". The Scarab always faced south. So did the Desert's first boss, and the museum's, and most of the others.

There is a flag in my monster code called southOnly. It exists because the early bosses were generated as a single south-facing view, and the runtime's default behaviour is to mirror a sprite when the monster is to the right of the hero — which, for art that is already facing the camera dead-on, produces a mirrored boss rather than a turned one. So southOnly switched the flip off.

What I had forgotten is that the same flag also switches off the walk cycle. A south-only boss can never turn and can never bob. Three quarters of the fight it stood perfectly still, which is the other thing that made it read as a specimen.

What changed

The Scarab is a third character now, generated from the south-east with the body plan spelled out in depth order — standing on all six legs, head toward the camera — with a walk cycle and a separate animation set for each of its attacks. The flag is gone from its definition, and it is the first boss in the game that does not carry it. New bosses are generated facing east and leave it off.

And because it now walks, it needed a reason to. Three of its four attack patterns hold it in place, so a player who kept their distance was never in danger from the boss itself — only from what it threw. It got a fifth pattern: Sun Dive. The wing cases snap open, the aim locks, and its shadow races across the sand to the spot it has chosen over half a second before it moves, under a ring at the blast radius. Then it flies at you.

The tell is the house rule for anything that arrives out of the air, and this game has three of them now: the aim is locked at the wind-up and the shadow is drawn on the ground. Walking off the spot always wins. A telegraph you cannot outrun is not a telegraph.

The thing I keep relearning

I have a note to myself that says judge art from a still, never from a fight, and I wrote it after a different sprite shipped facing the wrong way for a day. I clearly did not obey it. So now there is a script: it walks a boss through its whole entrance and writes six crops of it into a folder, framed so its feet are on the bottom edge of every image. It takes one command and it is the only way I have found to see a 384-pixel sprite as a sprite rather than as an obstacle I am currently trying not to die to.