ROB GREEN
TECHNICAL DESIGNER
RGGAMEDEVELOPMENT@HOTMAIL.COM
ROB GREEN
TECHNICAL DESIGNER
RGGAMEDEVELOPMENT@HOTMAIL.COM
Boss Fight Design
At the end of multiple stages the player encounters a boss character, this begins a multi-stage fight different to the other NPCs. This gave me the opportunity to add some more complexity into the gameplay, but I had to temper that against the time constaints.
There are 3 boss fights in the released game:
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Starbear - 2 different movement phases, grounded, heavy concussive impacts, mortar-like poison projectile, dodge-able charging attack
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Goliath - teleportation, player movement-heavy, ranged attacks, arena-sectioning attacks
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Captain Kaz - portal usage for ranged projectiles, biome-swapping ability, mob NPC spawns, arena-sectioning attacks
Where the Goliath already existed before I took over and required tweaking, it was my task to design the boss enemy and fight flow, as well as the arena design. With this in mind I built a simple set of rules for what they can do:
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Multiple phases tied to boss health value
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Escalation of difficulty through each phase
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Movement and camera locked to an arena space within screen bounds
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Can break the one-attack rule that other enemies have
This then gave enough variance from other enemies to let me separate these as "bosses", but kept the scope reasonable to reuse our existing systems while requiring minor additions.
In the above you can see my design sketches for different attack and ability concepts for the final boss fight. This character went through a few iterations, beginning with a simple upgrade of the original Goliath design, to a true final battle feeling experience. This required some additional behaviour on top of the upgrades, such as the "Reality Shift" level layout change that spawns biome-specific enemies, or the "Dimensional Shield" that randomises its shape.