During Xenogunner's development, one concept I had in mind was that I wanted each episode to feel different from each other. The first episode was a short tutorial. The second episode was a mish-mash of various strange concepts.

...so what was episode 3 going to be?

That was a question me and the rest of the dev-team weren't quite sure of for a while. So my first idea that we tried to go with was... well, a Metroidvania.

That was a mistake.

Development of the game slowed to a crawl while I tried to implement all the new things necessary to make it work. None of the boss concepts felt quite right, all of them felt like they were missing something.

We spent months working on that version of episode 3, and eventually we made the hard choice to scrap it and start over with episode 3. So we came up with a new concept to replace it, one which could still use some of the code I'd cooked up, and we set to work. Then we dialed it back slightly from the original plan, and here we are now, with the current version of episode 3.

So now episode 3 is an episode that basically just drops the stages from the first two episodes entirely and goes all in on boss fights after the first level. There's another cool gimmick it has which I won't be spoiling here, but rest assured we made good use of that code from the first concept for episode 3.

Well, that wraps up this article about a glimpse of what the game's development was like. I hope you're all enjoying the game!