Boss

By: Maya Siden / February 20, 2018 /
Program: Game Design
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Boss – A Design process

This week I have taken a first stab at designing the boss for our game. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the boss is of very high importance to our game. Everything before you face it is simply practice, the boss itself is the main course.

So, in hopes of gaining some understanding into what makes an enjoyable boss fight for a shoot ‘em up game, I have analyzed some boss fights from different kinds of games. My focus was on Cuphead (2018), a shoot ‘em up game famous for its great design and interesting bosses. But I’ve also spent some time looking at Floot, Touhou, Sly 2 and others like them. I found a lot of interesting designs and decisions, however what stuck with me the most was a common formula that seemed to appear in a lot of the fights. The core was that the boss had 3 stages and then 3 different attacks in every stage. Naturally this formula is slightly modified in every instance to suit the game as necessary, but it was a perfect base for me to work with.

When designing the actual attacks, I started by imagining the scene for the player. Seeing as I needed to know; the players position, the bosses position, the bosses attack and the bosses’ weak points I felt it necessary to go back and look from the players perspective. What would the player actually want to face? Based of the training so far, what kind of scenarios would be fun and challenging for them? So, I wrote down all the actions the player could take and numbered them, like this;

  1. Primary fire
  2. Secondary fire
  3. Teleportation ability
  4. Movement

I then started combining numbers to see if I could set an interesting scene with them. Like this;

1 + 2
(Primary Fire + Secondary Fire)
The primary fire is good against a lot of small targets and the secondary is good against singular but strong targets, so send in a couple of small and easy enemies and have the boss show one big weakness. With this the player will naturally want to use the secondary fire against the boss but won’t be able to do so continuously since they will occasionally have to switch to defending themselves against the smaller enemies.

Like this I combined the players different abilities and actions to create as many scenarios as I felt necessary. After that I picked the 9 scenarios I liked the best and sorted them in such a way that I felt like it would follow the earlier mentioned “boss pattern”.

This was the result:

Stage 1: (1+4)(2+1)(1+2)
Stage 2: (2+3)(1+3)(2+4)
Stage 3: (2)(3+1)(1+2+3)

As the reader this probably doesn’t tell you much, but that right there is the first draft for my boss design. Next up, testing it.

Lots of Love
//Maya

 

About Maya Siden

2017 Game Design
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