Blog 4: Making a boss fight with a feeling
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Now that we are nearing the last weeks of the project means that we are on the final parts of our games and in our case the only thing left, except for balancing and testing that is, is our boss fight. In our game we chose to have the boss being sort of attack-able, a change we thought would be a bit better since in the original concept the player can only run and dodge. At first we had planned that the player would be able to see Umibozu chasing you to create a more scary feeling, but we ended up with deciding that Umibozu will only be a shadow chasing the player at the top of the screen. For the actual fight we decided that the player will be able to deflect an attack where the boss reaches towards the player in attempt to sort of slap the player with a tentacle. To deflect the attack the player just has to shoot towards the tentacle and it will either retract or it will fade and since the boss can only spawn more it will create a good feeling that the boss in invulnerable. Having the actual boss not being able to take damage and the feeling of shooting it and it doesn’t die would be a lot better to create a more stressed and terrified feeling for the player. This would give the feeling that no matter how much to shoot and struggle, the end is only getting closer.
As mentioned earlier the boss fight will have the boss chasing the player off-screen, you will only be able to see his tentacles, while it tries to reach the player and grab them. He also has another attack where he spawns whirlpools around the play area. This was inspired by what people who had “seen” Umibozu had described it, with phenomena such as whirl pools or tentacles being seen around a large dark shape in the water. I tried to make the boss fight give the feeling that many who have claimed to have seen Umibozu have described it.
The thought behind the boss fight is that the player must remain calm to be able to focus and dodge and if the player panics he will only make it harder. The boss fight should be hard, since it is the boss fight and the end point of the game so the player has the climb over the last part of the game to then be able to relax. The only problem we have had so far is that we haven’t been able to test it yet, we only started working on this for the current week so balancing the spawn rate of the whirlpools, the timing for the tentacles trying to reach towards the player might be a bit hard. The most important for the boss fight is to make it not too difficult, but at the same time we wanted to be somewhat difficult. Having an anti-climatic boss fight is one of the worst things in games, having fought through an entire game to just have the last boss be super easy is just plain boring. You want that last boss to be hard, to be something memorable that the player can look back on and think to themselves how hard that boss was.  |
