Meet the Comb Overlord

The Comb Overlord ends act 1 of Earfh. He is a political strongman parody, and he goes by exactly one name. The design spec's rule is that he is always called "Comb Overlord," never the real name, and no image of him carries text.

He took an odd route back to that role. When the enemy sprites were remodeled on September 24, the new art drew him as a CEO. The moveset design written the same day reversed that. He went back to being a parody caricature, and the CEO art moved aside to become boss number two, the Pen Pal, who is built but fightable only in a debug practice arena until act 2 exists.

Two forms, seven attacks

The fight has two forms. THE RALLY runs from full health down to half. He stands behind The Wall, a frontal barrier with a visible cue before it drops, and he can summon a three minion crowd that shields him while it lives. At 50% he becomes SECOND TERM. He is invulnerable for two seconds, the crowd is cleared, the camera shakes, his sprite sheet swaps and a banner goes up. In that form the barrier is gone and he moves 1.4 times faster. Each form escalates once more, at 75% and at 25%.

Seven telegraphed attacks are split across the two forms. A few names give the tone. There is the Toupee Whip, the All-Caps Post, Fore!, and It's Rigged!, which lights a checkerboard of floor tiles around the player and erupts one color of it. Every attack has a wind-up with a visible telegraph, and none deals damage during its own wind-up. The whip is his weakest attack and his most frequent.

One property carried over from the first boss spec, which calls it load-bearing. Every weapon has to be able to win both forms. The pistol works the barrier windows in form 1 and the shotgun clears the crowd. In Second Term the shotgun punishes the 1.2 seconds he spends winded after a Tantrum charge.

500, 300, 600

His health has moved twice. He started at 500. On September 22, after playtest feedback that the fight was "pretty tough," and after a fix that made his barrier turn to face a flanking attacker had roughly doubled the time to kill for two of the weapons, he dropped to 300.

Then the moveset shipped, and the first playtest of the new fight took 26 seconds, 7 of them in Second Term. I wanted him tankier. On September 25 his health went to 600.

The repo also measures the fight without a human. A test drives each weapon's real firing path against a real boss level until he dies. The driver tracking him is idealized, and it models no skill and no error. At 300 HP the pistol took 2,316 physics frames, the shotgun 1,677 and the ricochet 2,814. At 600 HP those became 4,485, 3,285 and 5,051, all inside the test's 9,000 frame budget.

At 60 frames per second, even the fastest of the 300 HP runs is slower than the 26 second playtest. So these numbers answer two questions, whether each weapon can kill him and how the weapons compare. They do not predict how long a person takes.

Still first guesses

The 600 is the only number in this fight that a real play-through has moved. The roadmap lists the rest as first guesses: every wind-up, damage figure and pause, the whip's weight in the attack rotation, the bolt speeds, the barrier's arc and the form thresholds. It also flags questions only play can settle. One dodge roll answers one Tantrum charge, so the second charge has to be sidestepped, and that needs checking for fairness. Second Term's first attack can start as little as 0.7 seconds into its two seconds of invulnerability, which needs the same check.

The attack poses have no art yet either. The toupee lift, the raised arms, the raised phone and the golf swing need frames no sheet has, so code-drawn arcs, rings, lanes and aim lines stand in for now.

Under all of it sits the instruction the roadmap repeats most. Tune it by playing.