Designing Encounters, Part 5: Bosses

The Death Star. The Huge Dragon. The Colossus of Sardus. Zeus Almighty. Darth Vader. Magus. Lavos. Sephiroth. The Lich King.

What exactly is a boss?

It's a grand encounter of epic scale. Unlike anything you've ever known. Instead of the player needing to adapt his style now he's playing on an entirely different turf.

Designing a boss is so freeform since all the rules can ultimately be thrown out the window. Have your boss be flying. Have your boss be an entire stage. Have him negate most of the player's abilities. It doesn't quite matter how you design it.

There are a few basic types of boss fights, but you should never adhere to them with a passion. Remember, you have the freedom to design boss fights to be epic. That should be your goal.

Common Boss Types

1. Trick Boss

This type of boss involves some kind of "trick" to defeating it. The boss that reveals his weakpoints every 6 seconds after an attack. The boss that you need to figure out how to properly advance.

Trick fights tend to be annoying if particularly obscure, especially if you *must* figure out the trick to defeat the boss.

2. Staged Boss

This type of boss consists of multiple boss fights linked together by stages. Perhaps you blow away the creature's exterior shell sending it into a berzerk fury.

Staged bosses become annoying if they are particularly long and are unforgiving because restarting the boss encounter essentially forces the player to lose a lot of progress.

3. Environmental Boss

This type of boss represents a threat in an environment difficult to navigate. The monster chasing you down an unfamiliar path, the mutated spider chasing you up a spiral of stairs. This fight is more about successful movement, rather than direct attacking.

4. Timed Encounter

This type of boss is simply undefeatable in the usual sense. The player must wait for the appropiate moment or survive and endure until a preset time limit in order to defeat the boss encounter.

General Guidelines to Bosses

Boss design is too freeform to pin it down to a science of abilities. You shouldn't restrict yourself by arbitrary rules. Here are some general guidelines for boss encounters that are less about the boss and more about how a player will interact with the encounter as a whole.

1) The easier it is to restart a boss encounter, the less forgiving your boss encounter can be.
2) The harder it is to restart a boss encoutner, the more likely your players will quit if they fail.

These two are taken hand to hand. A boss defeat isn't so annoying if you can instantly jump back to the beginning of the boss fight. A boss defeat is incredibly depressing once you've realized you been kicked back 4 levels and now have to redo entire swathes of the level.

3) Never lock out the player completely from experimenting - The Player's actions should still be meaningful.

If your boss can only be damaged by a single weak point that is covered most of the time and is invulnerable otherwise you are essentially negating all the players' skills that he has learned. The player should feel free to experiment and power on through times where the boss isn't attacking.

4) If a level doesn't need a boss fight or if you find yourself designing a boss "just because", don't force it.

Bosses are large, memorable and complex affairs and often expensive time-wise to implement. Games like Shadow of the Colossus have shown that they can carry entire games by themselves. Therefore, if you find yourself designing an unmemorable boss simply for the sake of having a boss consider scrapping that idea entirely. There are other ways to bring levels to a crescendo than designing a wild dumb brute.

5) Aspire to make a boss, his character and the fight iconic or particularly memorable.

Make the fight dramatic. Give the fight it's own theme song. These are memories that the player will carry on. Crono Trigger's boss fight with Magus is particularly memorable out of all the boss encoutners due to build up and suspense.

6) The complexity of the fight should match the time it takes to complete the fight.

If a fight is particularly simple, don't make it overlong. If a fight is particularly complex and challenging, don't make it a short instant kill. Pace the player according. As soon as the player has "figured out" what to do, the fight should end quickly for trick fights.