Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Overview
This is the final part of my work in our project group, while it’s not implemented in the demo, I still tried to define and draw a sketch about how a boss fight looks like, and what’s the design considerations behind it.
Boss Fight Should Be Special
This may be the most important consideration. In my opinion, the most unforgettable boss fight gameplay experiences in other games always have a unique mechanism or special fight process. It makes no sense when the boss acts like an ordinary enemy. A boss should be special, powerful, and challenging. A boss should have special attacks and movements that force players to react and counter.
Because our game is a pacifistic platformer game, instead of making a boss fight like a run-and-gun platformer game, I tried to combine the rhythm part of our game with the robot boss.
Rhythmic Boss Fight
The idea is built around the concept of battle rap, the boss will emit the projectiles on beats, with an encoding sound effect and color corresponding to the main character’s ability.
The thin and soft ones can be canceled by using the corresponding abilities, after canceling all the projectiles multiple times (the main character wins battle rap) the boss will enter phase 2 and emit uncancelable projectiles and summon moving platforms trying to deal damage with this combo. The boss can be defeated by jumping through the barrage and touching it 3 times.
This is the sketch of the boss fight.
The inspiration came from traditional rhythm games, such as OSU! Mania or DanceDanceRevolution. Players are required to react according to the pattern of tiles in this Boss fight like playing a rhythm game, especially when there are beat effects of projectiles and character abilities.
This is the final article, something I don’t mention here may be added in the GDD. Feel free to contact hengyil@kth.se if there is something that I need to clarify more.