Boss Fundamentals

Here's something different! I usually go on game design ramblings in the Discord room, but that's easy to miss and I figured it'd be cool to have a more permanent place to put them. Some of these will be about stuff I did in Copy Kitty and other ones will be random musings about unrelated games.

For this one I'll be talking about Yoggvals! Or more generally, boss fundamentals. Yoggval is a recurring midboss in Copy Kitty, which shows up about 5 times throughout the game (and an upgraded hard-mode version of each). Each one has the same template - a dash move, a stomp move, and a projectile - but they all have vastly different implementations of that template.

Here's a video of the very first one in the game. (Patreon doesn't let me embed videos and it doesn't even let me use a clickable image thumbnail, so it needs to be a text link. The video's around 1 minute long.)

First off, the single most important advice for anyone making any action game: the more the player has to move around, the more fun it is. If you're dashing all around the screen and attacking from all angles, it feels awesome even if the battle's easy! Meanwhile if you're planted in the middle of the screen and hitting the guard button whenever something's close to you, it gets old pretty quick, even if you still need to aim your shots or react to things. (Speaking very generally of course. There's exceptions to both sides, but they're uncommon.)

So why'd I pick that set of 3 moves (dash/stomp/projectile) as the basis for the recurring boss? Because it's the simplest way to make players move a lot! If the boss dashes then you need to jump, and if the boss stomps then you need to run. The projectile attack serves as a "modifier" to the next attack, forcing you into a different position so you can't always run/jump from the same part of the screen, and sometimes forcing you into a corner where your options are limited.

Re-read that last paragraph if you didn't quite process it, since it's super important! Each attack has a very specific purpose, and there's no overlap between them.

Here's a later Yoggval battle that's a little more complex. (Also about 1 minute long.)

The main dynamic in this one is jumping between the middle platform and the side platforms. If you're in the middle and the boss stomps, you need to jump to the sides... and if you're on the side when the boss dashes, you need to jump back to the middle. The magnet projectile modifies the next attack by adding a tiny bit of unpredictability, requiring a little more precision and preventing you from doing the exact same movements each time.

All of this comes pretty naturally once you've seen the boss go through a few cycles, since each individual attack is really simple and you've fought other Yoggvals before! You don't really need to "memorize the boss's moveset", it's all about figuring out how to dodge each attack in slightly different situations (different starting platform, and different magnet positions).

I focused on short bosses here, since it's super important to have strong fundamentals if people will only have a few minutes to figure it out before they either win or lose. If it's a big important boss where the focus is more on the spectacle than the mechanics, there can be attacks that "just look cool" without serving much of a design purpose, but remember to have strong fundamentals too!

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Summary: Focus on giving your boss a small set of attacks that each make the player move in a different way. It'll automatically lead to some emergent situations where the same attack gets dodged differently depending on what stuff came before it! Try to make sure the entire arena gets used, whether it's complex terrain that affects the battle or simply to make the player get cornered every once in a while.

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I could talk about this for ages, and point to a bunch of other examples in a lot of different games or talk about how it applies to other genres, but I want to keep this first article pretty short. Next time you're playing a cool action game, pay attention to what it's doing to get you to move a lot, and see if it's following my guidelines here!

Any questions about this, or any suggestions for what I should write about later? Leave a comment below! I wanna know how much interest there is for these articles, since it's a lot different from the usual content here.

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• entanma.com, our main site
• @AzureLazuline on twitter
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