Madfox:
That will be awesome! Best monster yet, cant wait to see it with all of the frames of animation and some texturing :)

Ijed:
MeatHoleDemon looks proper scary. I think the tail gives it a very devilish look. Attacks could be a tricky one. Red fire perhaps? Wouldnt want it to looks cheesy :D Also that picture is very nice, who drew that?

Zwiffle/Metch:
That looks very sort of nightmareish. Kinda like a Cacodaemon with tentacles and no mouth. And bigger. So nothing like a Cacodaemon.

All concepts very quakey.
That Meatholedemon would make an OK boss, but I think it would be nice to see more than one of them in an episode. Like you say - a Shambler level enemy.
Man I wish I knew where to start with modeling. 

Throughout the battle the player wears him down despite his regeneration until he resorts to destroying the floor, levitating himself around the arena. Heavy attacks can disrupt his concentration though, causing him to fall into the void revealed below.

This sounds like a really proper intense bossfight. With different stages to drag things out a little bit.

I never liked how, in some games, you go "oh shit it's the boss, I better pull out my big guns" and then splat him against the wall in 10 seconds flat, because you used the big guns. Regeneration would avoid this problem I'm sure. ;) 

well, doing the shambler thing where the 'big guns' are not that effective works too. 

But phases are important, just complicated. PainKiller, with all the bosses it had was a good example of what to do / not to do. Like the Cthulhu type swamp monster which nobody understood.

A decent variety of attacks is important as well. 

I remember getting really frustrated with that. 

I think I might like some kind of room-sized boss that was basically growing on a ceiling and would pop out monsters in self defense while you just shot rockets at it or something. It could be above some kind of arena with lava or other traps that you would have to maneuver around while avoiding other monsters and trying to line up a shot.

I guess the weak points would be eyeballs or something on this giant ceiling-growth, I dunno. Seems like it would be fairly Shubbish. 

http://www.flyingomelette.com/oddities/sab/mantorok.jpg

Which was a massibe blob with tentacles, covered in eyes and mouths, also impaled by magical pillars which bound it.

Similar to what we're planning for Shub, yeah. But that depends on the team. 

I really should write a bigger post about this sometime, but have you guys played (or heard of) Arkham Horror? It's this RPG-ish multiplayer board game where you fight tons of lovecraftian monsters spewing out of portals to other dimensions, controlled by elder gods. Tons of fun, and all the stars of the Lovecraft bestiary are there. Might be good inspiration for monsters I could figure out how to translate the experience to good ol' Quake. 

Crazy intense boss battle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucahQg_wWZA

Makes me wanna play some Hexen. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/zork2.gif 

 

but im having trouble imaging it walking, it doesn't have legs like the shalrath with the knees bent out 

The legs indeed stand indsside out.
I don't know what it is.., making a fast chalk of the model goes fine, as soon as I try my best it ends up in verticemeshes. 

It does look like it has three legs from where I am sitting.

You could have aggressive flailing of arms, Aggresive waving of tenticles, and running towards player; perhaps casting a spell with adifferent motion...... 

I know, only the tentacle screw is hard to tend, because of the oppertunity to make them wail without getting crossed.

Also my usual three leg walk is a bit hard to lay hands on as I mostly experience this on drunk feet.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/zork4.gif 

So that's how you're figuring it out :) 

Convertion of the antlion to Quake1.
Rather a heavy model as it takes 1050verts / 2361tris.
Sad I have only the standpose with skin, so to make it worthwhile it needs a decent base frame.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/AntLion.gif

The original skintex is 256x256, as doom files.
And that was also much work to get in Qml 199 x 300.
I've been trying with odd shapes of the baseframe, but it only gives vertice loss. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/AntLi0n.gif 

 

That Antlion is Excellent ! 

It has come to my conclusion following the response to A Roman Wilderness of Pain that it's best to just not have boss monsters at all. Personally I loved the end battle because it was immensely challenging and took me several goes to figure out, which is exactly what a boss battle SHOULD do. The whole idea of a boss is that the player has to figure out how to use all of the tools that he's been supplied with to engage in a battle that's probably five or ten times harder than anything that's come before. Tronyn's boss battle did just that -- had I not used the grappling hook to evade danger spots I would never have been able to recoup the ammo or gain the cover required to take out the final boss and win the game. Another crucial part of the strategy which I only figured out after two or three deaths was to conserve the Tome of Power until after I had activated most of the Boss moments, which thanks to the grappling hook was still reachable. To me, that's everything a boss battle should be. It required a very small amount of trial and error, but that only intensified the feeling of satisfaction at the end.

I think a lot of people are far too quick to turn on God mode as soon as they encounter a tricky situation that they don't immediately recognize, which is a shame.

There's a lot to be said for finishing an episode with an interesting or different combination of regular monsters, as it challenges those who enjoy being challenged but also doesn't scare off the people who don't. 

I think I'm repeating myself: Bosses should just provide peaks in difficulty and at most require mild variations of normal gameplay patterns. I hate when i have to figure out stuff specific to the boss battle. I love when there's several strategies to chose from and you can try to find the best. That doesn't work if there's only one that works and all other fail, though.

Recently played through metroid prime, and the boss fights kept pissing me off (mostly controls related "what buttons do I need to press in what moments to survive!?" moments though).

Good examples are the descent 1/2 bosses (except the final d2 boss, which you had to shoot in the back to kill). They have special powers like robot generation, invisibility, homing missiles, etc., but all those features also exist on other, normal robots, so there's nothing to figure out than the best way to do the most damage without getting hit. 

I agree somewhat with megaman above, but I take more of a middle stance: Boss fights should reuse and extend game mechanics that have already been established, true, but they should also be interesting and can have some puzzling elements to them. Puzzles fail when they are not foreshadowed by previous gameplay.

I think the chthon and shub bosses were good, the main problem is the game mechanics they rely on were never properly established beforehand.

However chthon was not that bad, players are already trained to look for buttons and see what they do. I think the main problem with chthon was that you can't immediately tell that he's invincible, because you will probably attack with rockets, which don't spawn blood even when they do damage. If i was attacking him with a shotgun or nailgun, it would have been much easier.... perhaps the rockets should have actually bounced off him, to make it clear.

Shub was harder because 1. telefragging is never introduced before that point, 2. the spikey ball's behavior is never introduced before that point, and 3. shub bleeds, implying that you can kill her with weapons. 

I like the Doom 3 boss battles. I'm probably dumb.

The seeker thing wasn't established before, and it seemed a bit ... "let's make this a novelty", but you are told what to do.

I like bosses like Sarge.

I like minibosses, too.

The Arwop boss battle was well thought out, I have nothing against the mechanics used. It was just over the top. In my opinion. 

Would it be a hard qc nut to refleckt the dmg of a shield back to the player, meanwhile protecting the monster?