Hey everyone, and welcome back to the VV Eekly Update!
Quick update on Bowser from last week: he’s been recovering well! He seems to be mostly normal from the stroke, although his back left leg is still not moving as well, and he’s been returning to his usual, cuddly self. I’m still spending some quality time with him (I’m writing this at 4:30 AM while monitoring him), but we’re hoping to return to as normal of a life as possible within the next few weeks.
I still haven’t quite returned to a full schedule with Vyn and Verdan yet, but we’re getting closer. I didn’t want to leave y’all hanging though!
This week, I want to tell you about my thoughts on boss design.
Bosses
Bosses are an interesting aspect of game design. In theory, a game could be entirely made of smaller encounters, and it could be an entirely technically complete experience.
However, bosses are a way for a game to tell a story. In the same way that a novel or a movie wouldn’t feel as satisfying without a dramatic climax, a game wouldn’t feel quite as satisfying without a boss! Bosses are a way for games to raise the stakes on the player. It says “pay attention to this!” and “this is dramatic!”
In many games, including Vyn and Verdan, it’s also a way for the game to somehow break usual operating procedures. For example, enemies usually are a small self-contained entity with no interactions, but bosses are multiple bodies acting in coordination. Rather than having just the enemies roam around, the whole room gets involved. It’s different, and it’s more impressive!
Boss Design
To be quite honest, boss design is an area where I haven’t quite put my thoughts into order. This might seem odd, since you just read a few paragraphs with my thoughts, but I’m really talking about specific boss design.
How do you decide what the boss looks like? How much health does the boss have? How difficult should the boss be to defeat? What kind of story does the boss tell???
I think really memorable games come with really memorable bosses. This tracks with what I said above – bosses are the story’s climaxes in video games. People remember what happens in the climax!
I’ve said all that to really say: I don’t know what I’m doing! Turns out that writing a compelling story is pretty difficult. However, I’ve tried my best so far. I’ve come up with some very basic rules to make bosses feel cool.
First, bosses need to balance between single-target and multi-target fights. There can be slight advantages to using one or the other, but both should be fairly viable. I accomplish this both by having bosses have multiple bodies and adding minions to each fight. Since the multi-target ability is limited by how far it can reach, this is helped by the second point, which is…
Bosses should take up the whole room. Boss rooms are wider than normal rooms, and it should feel like the whole room is used in the fight! Bosses should interact with the room somehow. It should feel like the room is truly the boss’s territory, and you’re intruding.
Third, bosses should have some special abilities that build on their smaller version’s abilities. The mushroom boss is a more advanced version of the mushrooms. The bee boss is a more advanced version of the bees. The fight shouldn’t be too foreign to players once they arrive.
We’ll have to wait and see whether the bosses in Vyn and Verdan really stand out. Will this story’s climax be compelling? I don’t want to spoil too much here, so I won’t show you too many specifics – if you want to see, ask to play test! For now though, here’s a preview of the first boss: Mushy.
Not quite as pretty as the bosses shown above, but I think it has a certain charm to it.
That’s all for today. If you have any thoughts about bosses, climactic or not, please post them into the Discord!