Introducing the Evil Dervish aka "İblis-i Derviş"! 🔥

When I was a kid, those twirling sufi dervishes always gave me the creeps, despite being all about peace and stuff. I guess I had a weird childhood. Their spinning moves and strange outfits just stuck with me. You know, those dervishes, especially in Turkey usually wear white, like a symbol of purity. But the enemy that haunted my thoughts took a different form—a Dark Dervish rocking black robes with eye-catching red details.

This evil guy, the İblis-i Derviş, is an oldie hiding behind a freaky red mask that kinda looks like a Tengu mask. And guess what? They've got some crazy powers. They can hover a bit off the ground and have fiery flames swirling around their hands. They love to chuck those flames at anyone who gets in their way. Picture constant spinning and a whole lot of dark shades. They're seriously spine-chilling.

To bring this baddie to life, I drew a basic sketch to show my pixel artist what I had in mind. Originally, I imagined them with feet, and the flames shooting up from their palms. But my awesome pixel artist suggested skipping the feet, making the sprite-making process easier and cheaper. Oh, and they came up with the swirling flames idea too. Genius, right?

So here's the deal. In the animation, the Dervish keeps on spinning while their arms lengthen and shorten. If you get too close when their arms are all stretched out, you're gonna get hurt. But when their arms shrink back down, that's your chance to strike. And watch out! They'll also toss fireballs at you from time to time. Yeah, it's like a boss fight, intense and all.

I'm super stoked to see this enemy come to life in my prototype but this is going to take some time. This week I am going to push a bit harder on the engine and coding and less design.