Wohooo! Time for a wall of text! It's been a while since I last made one of these :D
Lets talk about the improvements on the design of the boss fightSo, I've never ever liked the idea that during the second phase, the objective of the players is to reach that weak link on the top left of the room and break it. Why? Because it's completely unrelated to what's been happening throughout the fight.
I decided to come up with a way to relate the first phase (pressing the buttons) with the scond one, or at least making something that feels more natural that eventually lets the player know what they have to do without arbitrarily saying:
"Hey! You are on the second phase of the fight! See that thing on that place you have never ever had to even see before? Well you have to get there and break something! Ok? It's hard to get there so it's probably fun!"The objective of the second phase is "breaking a chain", pretty simple and understandable, but it has nothing to do with the buttons at the beginning... you can't even see the freaking thing unless you wall jump high enough because you felt like exploring! So I decided to inject some logic into the buttons because to be honest, up until now they just magically dropped The Eye to the ground for a couple of seconds. So what do the buttons do now? They activate these sort of pulleis that loosen the chains holding The Eye, making it fall. If you want more unecessary specifics about it, the magi that built this place made that to be able to reach The Eye to do maintenance to it.
Ok so, we now know what the hell it is the buttons do. Now what...? The new idea for the next phase is
MORE CHAINS! ... Let me elaborate on this. These chains are all holding The Eye in place, so what happens after the buttons are broken by the boss, is that one of these chains' links cracks, making it clear that it can be broken.
When a chain is broken, The Eye's position will be lowered a little bit, making it clear that that chain was holding it in some way. This leads to the thought of
"perhaps if I get rid of all the chains it will fall to the ground and I will be able to hit it!". Cool right? But breaking chains alone is not that exciting, so what will happen is that these weak links will take A LOT of hits in order to be broken, and while you are doing that, the fists will be annoying the crap out of you, so you will have to be actively evading them while also tryingto break the chain.
Sweet! That sounds like something that could actually be fun. BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! The last chain that is supossed to drop the boss to the ground is in this really unreachable place and you have to deal with this complicated and hard to communicate mechanic of getting rid of specific fists in order to use the bridges to reach it.... Thats like too complicated and awkward in every possible way... And besides the awkwardness of its design, when the player is in this area, The Eye can't reach it, so they can basically stay there and take their time breaking it without any threat...
We get rid of the upper zone of the room because it sucks.
"But how the hell am I going to reach that last chain in order to break it and do sutff with the thing?!" PLATFORMS! Platforms are the beautiful solution to all of this. You see, the room is a big square, and because of this, there's a big portion in the middle that is unreachable for the players because they can only move upwards using the walls. To address this issue, there will be platforms in the upper area instead, these platforms will also serve as footing for the players to destroy the weak links.
Want to know what's also cool about those platforms? There's nowhere safe. The Eye can attack you anywhere. This is great because there is now constant pressure from the boss, generating tension on the players that are frantically trying to destroy all of these chains to beat the crap out of The Eye.
"Hey, but you got rid of the bridges, that means that the wall levers (the green things on the walls) are no longer useful! I liked those!" Me too, that's why they wont be removed, instead they will do something different. They will move a set of
dynamic platforms to the left or to the right depending on the levers you use. Why is this cool? Because there's even more shit a single player can do to help out in the fight! You just destroyed a chain on one of the platforms and need to get to the other side to reach the other one but you cant? Thats easy! one of the players takes care of moving the dynamic platforms so you can reach this other place! Cool right?
So that's it for the changes in the fight that will hopefully make more sense. One thing I'd like to hightlight, is something I think is really important about fight, and specially because this is a game focused on cooperation, and it is that even tho players have clear main objectives, there are secondary objectives that players can do in order to make things easier:
- You can dedicate time to killing a couple of Fists, this will result in having an easier time destroying the chains and moving around
- You can use the wall levers to help your teammates reach the other chains
- Other objectives that I haven't talked about include doing things like taunting The Eye
As the fight's design reaches its last stage, I hope to come up with a couple more of these secondary objectives to further enhance the cooperation feel the game is intended to have
TL;DR: More chains to break. Upper section sucks. Upper section with platforms doesn't.