As promised, in regards to your thoughts about an end boss here’s some ideas/possibilities to consider:
-When you beat the end boss, he says something like “you think you’ve won, but I’ll be back stronger” or maybe something less cliché but something to let the players know they can keep playing for a second quest. There could a 3 months later message following it saying the boss has come back and perhaps did something different like steal a bunch of princesses, friends, important items, or biome specific items or whatever to make it a bit different than however the main quest will turn out. You also just make it so the end boss flees to another far off land without having to do another main quest.
-You could simply make the end boss harder with health each time the player plays through the game or after each series of collecting something or rescuing someone. This might be a tad boring after a while but players might still play through a few times
-You could add more enemies to fight each time you fight the end boss as well including other boss characters.
-You could make a variety of end boss attack possibilities and choose a different combination each playthrough or just borrow from other bosses. The combinations should probably become more complex each time
-Similar to the last one, Each biome could have its own major boss with its own biome based attacks and the end boss could choose a combo of those on top of its own major attacks. Each playthrough the end boss gets one or two more attack possibilities based on these.
-You could make several combinations of boss parts (arms, legs, robes, head, attacks, etc.) and make a randomly generated “Mutt” main boss based on these parts for each main quest…heck you could potentially do this for more bosses if the code/engine will allow it…might be a lot of work but it would be pretty cool and in the spirit of a random generation game.
-You could make it so the end boss and perhaps other bosses in the 2nd+ quests change main attack if it senses you have been not taking much damage on whatever its current attack is.
-One plot line idea that might be simple to implement but emotionally effective in driving the player to complete the quest or 2nd+ quests would involve finding characters (or even princesses) to help you fight in your quest on occasion and then be captured or even killed by a boss or end boss and make the quest about saving that person or revenge or even resurrecting that person.
- One final note is you might also want to make updates to this game friendly to players that already have saved games once saved games is implemented so the players can save their items.
Well, theres some stuff to give you some ideas and the decisions are yours to make 😊 Hope this helps