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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperDesignWhat Makes Good Boss Design?
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J-Snake
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« Reply #20 on: August 15, 2012, 09:38:19 AM »

2. Bait boss into doing something stupid (e.g. ram into wall, get tentacle stuck in grate, etc.)

3. Weak point opens up
These are great ingredients for a boss fight, what it needs is a good cook.
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« Reply #21 on: August 15, 2012, 08:48:14 PM »

A good boss fight features QTEs and at least three arbitrary form changes
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« Reply #22 on: August 15, 2012, 10:24:26 PM »

I know what I definitely don't like, and it's when a boss fight goes like this:

1. Boss is totally impervious to all attacks

2. Bait boss into doing something stupid (e.g. ram into wall, get tentacle stuck in grate, etc.)

3. Weak point opens up

4. Hit weak point until it closes (modern games: do quick-time event first)

5. Start over

It's totally artificial and repetitive.
It's still better than:

1. Stand in front of boss.

2. Spam the attack button to hack away at the boss's huge health bar.

3. Stand back to avoid the boss's stupidly predictable and easy to avoid attack.

4. repeat steps 1 through 3 50 more times.
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« Reply #23 on: August 15, 2012, 10:35:16 PM »

Quote
* Bullet sponge bosses are shit.

Are the boss monsters in Doom considered bullet sponges? Huh?
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Maud'Dib Atreides
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« Reply #24 on: August 15, 2012, 10:37:05 PM »

I know what I definitely don't like, and it's when a boss fight goes like this:

1. Boss is totally impervious to all attacks

2. Bait boss into doing something stupid (e.g. ram into wall, get tentacle stuck in grate, etc.)

3. Weak point opens up

4. Hit weak point until it closes (modern games: do quick-time event first)

5. Start over

It's totally artificial and repetitive.
It's still better than:

1. Stand in front of boss.

2. Spam the attack button to hack away at the boss's huge health bar.

3. Stand back to avoid the boss's stupidly predictable and easy to avoid attack.

4. repeat steps 1 through 3 50 more times.

hello, shadow of the beast 2,

which although was a great game, had a final boss that had to be beaten by standing in front of the boss with a turbo-fire controller and holding down the attack button  or just mashing every adulterous sin out of that tiny 2cm by 2cm button while praying that the bosses' health would drain faster than yours.

in the end you have a boss and a player spamming the same attacks on each other, the one with the greater initial health wins right
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« Reply #25 on: August 18, 2012, 03:52:53 PM »

A boss battle shouldn't feel turned based unless it is turn based.

I think the Robot Masters from the Megaman series are a great resource for examining good boss battles. Of course that's if you don't use their weapon weaknesses to thoughtlessly bully through them.
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« Reply #26 on: August 18, 2012, 09:25:25 PM »

One that stands out is Plug Man from MM9. He can do two things: jump, and fire an electric ball. The terrain is irregular, and the ball follows the terrain. In addition, it climbs the wall and ceiling, and drops when it's above you. The end result is that you're doing 4 things at once: timed jump to avoid the ground electricity, horizontal movement to avoid the ceiling electricity, thinking ahead to where your position should be so he won't corner you, and periodically firing buster shots at him (you need to be at the right height, which changes).

What makes this so fun, I think, is that there are two sets of conflicting goals. You have to be at a certain height to dodge the attack, but usually at a different height to fight back. You have to move horizontally to dodge the other half of the attack, but that might back you into a corner.

It's one hell of a frantic fight, even though all he does is jump and shoot one attack!

Most of the other bosses in MM9 follow a similar formula, but Plug Man nailed it, so he stands out to me. Nitro Man from MM10 is pretty similar, my favorite from that game.
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« Reply #27 on: August 20, 2012, 10:45:03 AM »

My rule of thumb is that bosses shouldn't overstay their welcome and become speedbumps in a game's pacing.  Pacing is everything.  Let skilled players get through quickly.

--

I don't find waiting for an invulnerability-based boss to let you damage it a lot of fun, and luring it to the convenient environmental hazard (that is somehow more dangerous than the player) isn't much better.
My big problem with them is that they feel designed to be beaten, so it isn't even fun to win.  No matter how big and scary a boss looks, if it's stupid enough to keep being lured into explicitly making itself vulnerable, then it's not going to be threatening, and I'm not going to feel accomplished for beating it.  The boss is practically beating itself.

That said, I fully understand complaints about "bullet sponge" bosses.  Wailing on a non-threatening boss kills the pacing, too.  (Looking at you, The Binding of Isaac.)
My main suggestion for those is just to play/study more SHMUPs, since they're almost entirely "shoot until they die" bosses, and figure out what works and what doesn't from there.
I think a good starting place is usually just to make the boss more threatening, but easier to kill if you can survive.  Adding something to reward playing more aggressive (like a proximity-based damage bonus) is a good idea, too.
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baconman
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« Reply #28 on: August 21, 2012, 01:11:41 AM »

I think what's missing from most bosses is the fighting game mentality - making something that's about equal to the player, but with it's own offensive and defensive tactics. A great example are the bosses from MegaMan 1/2/3 - it doesn't take a whole lot to take them out most of the time (14 shots, IIRC? Some like Top Man, even just 7). But it also takes very little margin of error for you to lose to them, too (about equal, but some outrageously hard ones - pardon the pun - only took 4 attacks to finish you!).

They only had a few tactics, but it was enough to keep you on your toes in such swift, decisive battles. They also, like the player, got a moment of mercy invincibility when YOU scored hits against them as well, and had to proactively use certain powers/attacks that incurred any invincible states.

Granted, as the series progressed further, and you had charge busters, the bosses gradually became more damage-sponge-like, much to their detriment.
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« Reply #29 on: August 21, 2012, 10:47:23 AM »

My rule of thumb is that bosses shouldn't overstay their welcome and become speedbumps in a game's pacing.  Pacing is everything.  Let skilled players get through quickly.

This is one thing I respect about 2D Mario. Bosses are effective enough to be intimidating your first time fighting them, yet satisfying and simple enough to not ruin the pacing.
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« Reply #30 on: August 21, 2012, 10:55:37 AM »

The charge buster did a lot of negative things to Mega Man's pacing, aside from being awesome.

Boss Battles should rule.

So often I experience:
  1. Over too quickly.
  2. Over too slowly, requiring some repetitive action to beat.
  3. Requires nothing new to be figured out. Just more of the same, but harder.
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« Reply #31 on: August 21, 2012, 11:04:18 AM »



this guy
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« Reply #32 on: August 29, 2012, 09:35:09 AM »

What makes a good boss design?

SNK Boss Syndrome.
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« Reply #33 on: August 29, 2012, 10:10:11 AM »

I thought I'd post some examples of boss fights I thought were memorable.  I don't have much time to talk about why I like this boss fight but I'll just give you a link.  I'll post more later.



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« Reply #34 on: August 29, 2012, 11:04:42 AM »

Melon Bread is the best boss in 2D game history





Make a boss like that ^
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« Reply #35 on: August 29, 2012, 01:03:56 PM »

So I think what this topic taught me is that good boss design is completely subjective and hard to nail down. Shrug
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« Reply #36 on: August 29, 2012, 07:02:12 PM »

So I think what this topic taught me is that good boss design is completely subjective and hard to nail down. Shrug

I liked this thread more:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=27670.0

But I guess this one is more about the mechanics themselves instead of the boss character.
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« Reply #37 on: August 29, 2012, 08:27:20 PM »

Oooh yeah, that thread is a very good read. Lots of great stuff in there.
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« Reply #38 on: August 29, 2012, 08:49:31 PM »

My answer is probably going to be coloured a fair bit by Dark Souls, because I've been playing it a lot since the recent PC release. It quickly became one of my favourite games ever, but the boss fights were not one of the reasons I liked it. I'd go so far as to say it has pretty bad boss fights.

My reasoning is that fighting a boss in Dark Souls (and in a lot of other games) goes like this - die once or twice to the boss figuring out what moves he performs, then trounce the boss because the actual mechanics of the fight are easy once you know what to expect from trial and error. This is fake difficulty. Dying because the game didn't provide you knowledge of what was coming/there was no logical way of deducing what was coming.

I would fix this with the good old staple of boss phases. The first phase introduces the boss' moveset in a relatively safe environment. You learn how each attack is telegraphed and how to avoid it. Then in the second phase you up the ante by changing the boss' arena to make the familiar moveset harder to avoid, or perhaps the boss starts comboing abilities, or the player otherwise becomes restricted in a way that increases the difficulty.

If the player dies they have no-one to blame but themselves. The game taught them the mechanics and they died because they didn't apply this information correctly.
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« Reply #39 on: August 29, 2012, 09:43:50 PM »

So I think what this topic taught me is that good boss design is completely subjective and hard to nail down. Shrug
Sounds like you learned something really important then.
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