Boss Fight Research

Intro to Boss Battles

One of the first questions I like to ask myself when beginning a design is this: "What are my goals?" Essentially, I try to make it clear to myself what my design needs to accomplish so that every decision I make can hearken back to my goals. For boss battles, my goals are typically something like this:

• The boss should feel like a reward.
  • A boss battle is a reward from the game designer to the player. For a short time, the player gets to take a break and do something new!
  • Boss battles tend to be intense and feel "larger than life." Players look forward to boss battles, and getting to them feels good.

• The boss should feel like a goal (or milestone) for the player.
  • Like chapter breaks in a book, players reach a goal (minor or major) when they reach a boss battle. The anticipation leading up to a boss battle and the feeling of having attained a goal when the boss is defeated provide tangible story and emotional milestones for a player.

• By fighting the boss, the player can demonstrate his mastery of my game.
  • A boss battle is a good place for the player to demonstrate the skills he has learned so far by playing the game. In that sense a boss battle is both a test of the player's abilities and a chance for the player to feel like he has mastered the skills you've taught him so far.

• A boss fight can help build and release tension in a satisfying way.
• Like a good book or movie, it is important for a boss battle to have good "pacing," which is to say it's important for the game designer to build up and release tension and difficulty (or, in other words, intensity) over time.
• Good boss battles not only contain good pacing within the fights themselves, but also help to pace the entire game.
• The knowledge that a boss battle is approaching is a great excuse to build up intensity over the course of a series of levels. The closer the player comes to the boss fight, the more his anticipation of the fight grows. A clever level designer can use this to their advantage (as seen in the chart below).
• Boss battles are a great way to release the intensity you've built up over the course of the preceding levels. After finishing a boss, the player can expect to coast for a little while and feel good about his accomplishments.

A Boss, in a Nutshell

When I design a boss, I try to keep all of the above in mind, but that's a whopping huge pile of goals to remember! Because I like to keep things simple for myself, I like to boil all that information down to two points. I try to remember these two points at all times while designing a boss battle:

1. A boss is a test.

• The player can demonstrate mastery of the skills he has learned so far.
• Like a test at the end of a semester in school, a boss represents a goal -- an important milestone for the player to pass. And passing the milestone needs to feel rewarding.

2. A boss is a story.

• In addition to being a goal, a boss battle itself contains a number of smaller goals and milestones (or "beats"), just like a traditional narrative.
• A boss battle is paced and structured to provide an experience similar to traditional storytelling. It typically has a beginning, a middle, an end, and a number of story "beats" to glue all three together.
• By knowing the archetypical "story structure" of a boss battle, and why each beat is important, you can use the beats to create a memorable boss fight.

4) Decide how the boss defends himself

One common weakness in many boss battle designs is that the players can damage the boss character repeatedly and keep him in a state where he can't effectively use any of his attacks. When the player can do that, the boss isn't able to perform the moves you've designed to test the player's mastery. The battle begins to feel dull and unsatisfying.

To guard against this, you need to design the boss with defensive capabilities so he can withdraw from the fight or otherwise allow himself to attack without being interrupted.

Figuring out how the boss can defend himself is a critical step to building a boss fight that will serve as a good test of the player's abilities.

The Master

One of the most common types of bosses. Quite simply put, this is the boss that has minions at his/her side. This could be any number of minions, ranging from just one to as many as necessary. In the Master type boss battle, there is a clear cut boss entity, who poses the most danger and likely has the most health, and every other enemy is considered a minion.

There are a variety of ways this type of boss battle can be executed. It will often depend on the role of the boss itself and the minions. By default, the minions could just be additional damage dealers, or they could do something more, like buff or heal the boss.

The boss might also have the ability to revive the fallen minions, or perhaps summon new ones when the existing ones have been defeated. It is important to consider what sort of strategy is required on the behalf of the player. Normally the minions are easier to dispatch than the boss, and so most players will concentrate on beating them first before tackling the boss. But if the boss revives them, it means defeating them is a pointless exercise, and the player attention will focus on beating the boss first.

Even more complex strategies can be implemented with this type of boss battle. For example, the boss might be invulnerable or highly resistant to damage if at least one minion is standing. Perhaps all the minions must be dealt with before the boss can be hurt.

Boss fights where players face only a single entity consisting of numerous parts can also be considered as the Master type of boss, providing one of the parts is the most important one, i.e. defeating it causes all the other parts to also be destroyed.

The Heavy Pounder

The main idea of the Heavy Pounder boss type is a single enemy that dishes out huge amounts of damage every turn, which should force at least one party character to provide healing to the others on most turns. This boss doesn’t need minions. He or she alone is challenge enough. Quite often these types of bosses will have highly damaging AoE attacks that hurt all party members at once, or they might simply have more than one action every turn.

The balancing of these bosses needs to be really fine-tuned, because if the boss is not dealing enough damage, they’ll be too easy and boring, and if they deal too much, they become broken and unbalanced.

Of utmost importance here is the RNG on the boss’ skills. If the boss has 2-3 weak attacks and one uber powerful attack that it uses at random, this can cause a lot of problems with balancing. Lucky players might get away with the boss hardly ever using its most powerful attack, whereas unlucky ones might have it use that attack 3-4 turns in a row.

There are ways to go around this to keep it more balanced and controlled:

• Make all of the boss’ attacks roughly equal in how dangerous they are.
• Add cooldowns to the attacks that are deadly.
• Have the boss execute deadly attacks in a predictable pattern (see: The Charger).

Heavy Pounder bosses will mostly be two types: the low health ones and the high health ones. The low health ones would normally be highly offensive bosses, where the goal is to defeat the boss as quickly as possible before it’s caused too much damage to the party. The high health ones usually should be less damaging, but due to them lasting long, they will wear down the player party in a battle of attrition, and would hence require the player to think several turns ahead and to build longer-term strategies, like by using buffs and debuffs more.

The Charger

This is sort of similar to Heavy Pounder, except the idea of the Charger is to be charging up a powerful attack for several turns and then executing it in a predictable pattern.

The Charger can do this by simply doing nothing for several turns and then unleashing a devastating party-wide attack. Or it might just act as a normal boss and use weak attacks for several turns, only to suddenly pull out a much more dangerous one, and to keep doing so, once again in a predictable for the player pattern.

The strategy this boss type forces the player to use is to alternate between being offensive and being defensive. If the player can predict when the boss is about to hit hard, they would be encouraged to go on defensive in order to be able to survive what’s coming up.

Bosses with multiple forms can also be considered here, providing the key difference in their forms is the offensive potential, so the player can recognize in which form the boss is best not engaged.

The Resilient One

These types of bosses tend to have a lot of resistances. They could be highly resistant or even invulnerable to a lot of types of attacks or elements, and perhaps only have one or two weaknesses, which the player has to find. The challenge will mostly come from putting limits on what the player can use in order to be effective.

Some of these bosses will also change their weaknesses and resistances throughout the battle. This could either happen in a predictable pattern where the boss cycles between different forms every few turns, or this could be triggered once the boss’ HP reaches a certain point, and they force the player to change the approach.

These types of bosses can be very annoying to fight if they have way too many resistances, and it is good when there is more than one viable way to damage them. Ideally each party member should have at least one way to hurt this type of boss, or alternatively, the game could have a lot of playable characters and allows switching of the party mid-battle, in which case the player could be encouraged to find the perfect team set up to deal the most damage to the boss in question.

The Duo

As the name implies, this type of boss battle consists of two boss enemies. They should both be roughly equal in how dangerous they are (if one is significantly stronger than the other, then it’s simply an example of the Master with one minion).

The Duo can be two identical entities of equal power, or, as done very commonly, they could complement each other. They could do so in a variety of ways – either by having very contrasting resistances (e.g. one is weak to magic, another weak to physical), or by having contrasting offensive capabilities (e.g one deals powerful physical attacks, another powerful magic spells), or it’s even possible that the two execute combo attacks together, which would normally be more deadly than any attack by one or the other.

Most times the players would attempt to defeat one of them and then the other, what means that some additional strategies could be needed to make this type of boss more interesting. For example, as soon as one member of the duo falls, the other becomes more powerful, like via a stat boost, or possibly even gaining some of the abilities of his/her fallen comrade. Or perhaps the member that’s still standing could be reviving the fallen one, which would force the player to have to finish them both off within the same turn.

Boss fights where there’s only one entity that consists of two contrasting parts would also be considered a Duo, providing the two parts act separately each turn.

The Squad

This is when you have three or more enemies within the boss fight. The main trick here is that these enemies are all roughly similar in power and amount of health, and where none could be considered as the boss over the others (if one is an obvious boss, then this is an example of The Master).

The purpose of the Squad type boss fight is to overwhelm the player’s team with numbers. Three or more enemies whacking your party every turn can be deadly. What makes the Squad special is that it would be up to the player to decide which member to defeat first and which last. It’s possible that some enemies in the squad are more favourable to beat first than the others, but in general, the player is free to beat them in any order they prefer.

To keep a boss fight like this balanced, it’s important that each squad member isn’t too dangerous on their own. If every member of the squad unleashes AoE attacks on the player party, it could make the battle very cheap and unbalanced. Likewise, it’s a good idea to make the squad members vulnerable to various state effects, which could encourage the player to use more strategy. For example, if they stun one of the squad members, that’s one less enemy hitting them for a turn or two.

Normally the Squad type boss fight would be hardest at the very start, where each enemy is actively attacking the player party, and as more and more of them fall over the course of battle, it would get easier. However, just as with the Duo, it’s possible to spice this up by making the remaining squad members get stronger or acquire new abilities as their comrades fall in battle, meaning that the fight doesn’t get too easy by the end.

A boss fight where the player fights a single entity which consists of multiple parts is also an example of the Squad, providing none of the parts have importance over the others and can be destroyed in any order of preference.