Patch Notes Page 91

v0.0.636

Tightened Dragon melee behavior and attack pacing.
Reduced Dragon melee trigger distance so melee only starts at close range.
Added Dragon melee cooldown tuning (meleeCooldownMin / meleeCooldownMax) to prevent rapid back-to-back melee retriggers.
Dragon now resumes chase pressure between melee swings instead of repeatedly re-entering melee every frame.
Fixed Dragon animation commitment for melee and fire breath.
Dragon fire breath animation now runs as a one-shot sequence (full strip playback) instead of looping.
Dragon attack state timers now honor full animation duration for melee and fire breath.
Dragon facing is now held during committed attack states so directional strip changes do not restart the animation mid-cast.
Updated Dragon attack selection cadence.
When both attacks are available, Dragon now alternates between melee and fire breath rather than always selecting one.

Refined Dragon boss presentation and combat behavior.
Dragon now renders without boss recolor/filter tinting and keeps source sprite colors.
Dragon first-boss fallback spawning now also uses neutral Dragon coloring.
Updated Dragon combat loop for clearer melee pressure.
Ground behavior now actively chases players when out of melee range.
Melee animation now plays as a one-shot strike instead of looping continuously.
Reworked Dragon firebreath to be animation-driven (no projectile fireballs).
Firebreath no longer spawns projectile entities.
Firebreath now applies direct cone damage ticks during the breath animation.

Enforced Dragon as the first boss-wave spawn during runtime.
On the first configured boss wave, if no Dragon boss is present, the game now force-spawns a Dragon boss entity.
Any non-Dragon bosses spawned for that first boss wave are replaced to keep the wave behavior deterministic.
Hardened first-boss-wave behavior against branch/config mismatches.
Added a gameplay-level safeguard after wave spawn so Dragon-first testing no longer depends on a single spawn path.

Added Dragon archetype fallback injection for boss reliability.
If data/enemies.json is missing/invalid/incomplete, the loader now auto-injects a Dragon boss archetype directly from assets/Sprites/Enemies/Dragon.
This keeps first-boss Dragon tests working even when the JSON route fails.
Prevented silent random-boss fallback on first-boss Dragon waves.
If first-boss Dragon resolution fails, wave spawn now warns and skips that boss spawn instead of silently spawning a regular random boss.

Added explicit first-boss id routing for deterministic Dragon testing.
New gameplay setting: boss.firstBossId (default dragon).
First boss wave now resolves this id directly before any fallback boss selection logic.
Fixed first-boss config propagation across WaveSystem setup paths.
WaveSystem boss config now carries the first-boss id in all initialization/reset flows.
boss.wave = 1 + boss.firstBossId = "dragon" now forces Dragon at wave 1.

Fixed Dragon first-boss-wave routing to avoid fallback regular bosses.
First boss wave now resolves Dragon by dragonBoss metadata (with id fallback) instead of relying only on a hardcoded id lookup.
Added a warning log when first-boss-wave Dragon is requested but no Dragon archetype exists in enemy data.
Fixed boss config propagation during gameplay settings initialization.
WaveSystem now re-applies boss wave/interval/stat config immediately after gameplay.json values are assigned, preventing stale startup ordering from overriding boss.wave test tuning.

Fixed Dragon boss selection when changing boss-wave tuning for testing.
Dragon now spawns on the configured first boss wave (boss.wave) instead of being hard-locked to wave 10.
Example: setting boss.wave to 1 now correctly spawns Dragon at wave 1.

Added the Dragon boss event at wave 10.
Wave 10 now spawns a dedicated Dragon boss instead of a random boss archetype.
Dragon spawn is boss-only and excluded from normal enemy/event random pools.
Added a full Dragon behavior and animation state set.
Dragon now alternates between ground melee pressure, firebreath volleys, and launch/hover/fly kiting phases.
Dragon animation now uses dedicated action sheets (idle, walk, melee, launch, hover, fly, firebreath, death) with directional frame strips.
Updated boss pacing and animation support.
Boss milestone tuning now starts at wave 10 in gameplay data.
Sprite animation rendering now supports per-row frame start offsets for segmented strips.