The following sparkling insights about boss battle design are from Marcin Matuszczyk, principal gameplay designer on Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, and a former developer of Outriders and Horizon Forbidden West. He was speaking to an audience of budding Bowser-builders and Sephiroth-sculptors during a presentation at Digital Dragons this year. That said, gamedev panels can make dry reading for lowly laypeople, so for dramatic purposes, I would like you to pretend that the below is voiced by Michael Caine’s character from The Prestige. Specifically, think of the scene where he describes what goes into a genuinely great magic trick.
The second part is The Escalation. The game designer takes the ordinary enemy and makes it do something extraordinary. “You can add new moves, hazards, weapons, even change the area layout, to make the boss more challenging as the player progresses,” Matuszczyk suggested. Consider Genichiro from Sekiro, who strips off his armour and gains the ability to throw lightning, taunting the player to snatch it and toss it back. In general, the boss’s movements should befit the space of the fight, and help define it. The designer may give the boss smaller weakpoints to lure players in close, or add sweeping blows to force you to fight at a distance. Often it’s both, one after the other.
The Escalation may take the more deliberate form of The Midpoint Twist. “Think about how to surprise the player during the boss fight, to make it more memorable,” Matuszczyk said. “The boss can morph into a different creature, change location, or even change the rules of the combat.” Consider the Devil in Cuphead, who peels away his own skin in order to flee underground. Perhaps the game designer introduces a few minions to break the pace, like glamorous assistants strutting about the stage, while the magician hastily disposes of the crushed doves hidden in her tophat.
Within all this, there are The Tells. “Make your attacks clear with visual and audio cues,” Matuszczyk advised. “Ensure that losses come from the player’s mistakes, not from confusion. And keep the visuals clean, to avoid hiding the boss’s intentions.” These cues could include patches of ominous cracked ground, sonic waves, or laser dots ahead of a salvo. There’s also the option of non-diegetic elements – expanding red circles, flashing exclamation marks - though Matuszczyk dislikes ‘breaking the spell’ in this way. He’s keen to make bosses more “lifelike”, where possible – hence, taking heavy inspiration from animals when designing the bots for Horizon Forbidden West.
The Tells are integral to The Lesson, the ideas and techniques you want players to learn from the encounter. It could be learning how to shoot from horseback in Zelda while pursuing Ganondorf, or mastering the timing of pistol counters when going up against Father Gascoigne in Bloodborne. “Decide which player skills you want to challenge, and create attacks to test them, and tie these attacks to the boss theme,” Matuszczyk said.
The design of Tells becomes harder in multiplayer, when the game designer also has to worry about distributing and funnelling the boss’s attention: whether to concentrate on the closest player, for example, or on the player dealing the most damage within a certain duration. If you’re fighting alongside computer-controlled characters, they can form part of the act, part of the boss’s arsenal of pedagogic devices. Think of Atreus warning Kratos about incoming blows in God of War 2016.
But you wouldn’t clap yet. The Climax spills over into The Resolution – the knitting-together of the narrative context, the resealing of the magic circle, once every last healthbar has been hacked away. Perhaps the boss is somebody you know - a family member driven by opposing ideals, as in Ghost of Tsushima. But even if they are just an oversized ordinary enemy with more HP and attacks, there should be some kind of farewell.
