Boss Up: Boss Battle Design Fundamentals and Retrospective

[Music] all right my name is hi Karen I made a game called mushroom 11 released a couple of years ago it's a game with very peculiar and weird mechanics and even weirder bosses I also made a research a couple of years ago on 2d cameras and I decided to combine my two passions and try to created this retrospective of game bosses and what we can learn from using references from older to more modern games so what is a game boss a standard definition would look a little bit like this a significant computer-controlled enemy who must be defeated to achieve a goal or continue progress but we all know that the bosses that we remember and we like usually have one or more of these

items as a exception to this rule and from what I noticed it is closer to just an epic confrontation that serves as a microcosm of your game while temporal temporarily breaking its rules so the boss battle is definitely part of your game it needs to feel you as part of the unit which is your game but it's uniquely qualified to break and in all of the rules why do you need a boss I did basically look at it as a four different sections reward take a break from normal gameplay and reward players persistence with a new experience and a chance at a major of triumph dazzle surprise the player with an unexpected play experience engage use the battle to advance the story or create emotional attachment and challenge of course that test an acquired skill introduced new skills in preparation for what's next and we're going to talk about all these so shock and awe how we can dazzle the

players with unexpected confrontation and while creating a lasting first impression and you're probably going to notice that I haven't really put too much effort into the images because morning all right so what's the most important element even going back to 1975 this is what's considered possibly the first boss battle it's basically just an enemy with an unexpected strengths it is way more powerful than the player expected it's also very unlikely for you to win against the dragon in the dungeon and it feels like a David and Goliath it's a kind of a thread that goes across pretty much all boss battles an easy way to create or likely just standard way of creating a boss that feels invincible is using the

size this is mothership from Phoenix from 1980 what I consider probably the first modern boss the size is so large it also feels like it's almost impossible to to defeat this is possibly one of the best boss spells and the whole time we're going to talk about it a lot and this is a great example of how we can use technology in order to create the illusion of size and and how tech conserve the design in this case it was running on the NES the NES has a limitation of 64 foreground sprites each one of them is 8 by 8 or 8 by 16 which means that they had to create a boss mostly on the background and every time that a piece needs to move from one side to the next they moved it to the foreground animated it and then put it back to the background two decades later and another game used incredible

technology for the time this is Shadow of the Colossus we're going to talk about they created a physics system that's based on partially dynamics huge objects that influence the protagonist with its own inverse kinematics moving forward through the years God of War is a franchise that has some epic bosses huge bosses and we when we're trying to continuously surprise the player they end up increasing increasing the size of the boss continuously this the bosses in a God of War allow you to change their rules during play in this case the second phase of the boss is is a level in itself we're going to battle the boss from the inside and all the way to the comically large this is gone in wizened from Asura's Wrath the last phase of this boss is is so his lot in larger

than the planet and of course at some point it becomes it's not the same battle obviously so if it allows you to completely change we're going to talk about surprising the player and that is probably one of the best example of how you would able to be able to surprise the player in pretty much every aspect this is cine star from 1982 from Noah falstein and a new team they were able to create a game a space game where that completely was different from the space games all the time in both in terms of visuals the presentation the theme even the mechanics was much more complicated and it's mostly known for its crazy digitized voice again to to surprise the

players you can use all sorts of methods scare scare the hell of the players as you've seen many of the bosses in Silent Hill franchise and of course this memorable boss the great mighty poo from congressman Bedford a using humor and the presentation was something that I think everybody who played this and of course there are bosses in games that you wouldn't expect to have bosses this is Mark RDS surprisingly has bosses we're going to talk about very various different types of surprises throughout this talk this is just a quick presentation all right moving on engage we can use a game play the the pause in game play to tell a story and build anticipation towards the battle and revel in its outcome so the stories back

in the early days of video games were mostly a traditional story frame boy saves a girl probably remembered that there's a thread in Miyamoto's work and even moving on this is our caretaker more or less from the same time period used the same damsel in distress leash but in this case they used a lot of cutscenes to create a narrative progression and apply some foreshadowing which in turn create anticipation engagement towards the final battle with Akuma and now the bosses are perfectly capable now to present a story way more way deeper method this is Joker from the Arkham Arkham Knight and the Arkham series is one of the most amazingly has the most amazing bosses and great

storytelling in this case bought the Joker is already dead but is trying to battle its own be being forgotten and the first part of that battle is you playing as the Joker which is an amazing way of telling the story and creates this epic intro towards the bat way and if we're talking about the epic intros I still have shivers down my spine remembering this moment the first boss in shadows Colossus creating the the silence before the storm in preparation for the first epic battle another fantastic boss is Bob Barba's from DMC this this Bill O'Reilly leche Max Headroom just the presentation for this fight creates this rage and again builds anticipation towards the battle line back to the Arkham series

the the intros for the battles in this series really allow you to throw the players off and this in this case this is a kind of glitch that they put into the intro to this battle when the player sees this thing the ear immediately kind of thrown after their element which makes the anticipation fluid battle even even heightened and we're talking about Brazil force they will remember Psycho Mantis for Metal Gear Solid this battle begins with Psycho Mantis reading your save files and telling you what the games what games you like forcing you to unplug your controller in order to proceed with the battle that really challenges the boundaries of what the game can do and I believe that the boss battle can really allow you to is uniquely qualified to do just that and

after the battle is complete having some some outlet and it's short break allowing you to relish and gloat in the results of the battle and of course a transfer story this is a particular grotesque ending to the presiding battle and God of War 3 and this it might be the first true outro also quite grotesque this is Hitler from Wolfenstein 3d with its famous def cam TM as a quick anecdote I had to look up and a deaf cam TM and realize it was indeed a trademark by PBG player a known battleground which is funny because kill cam is owned by Activision so I think that tells the story anyway alright moving on to battle setup we've can fit the boss to its environment and vice versa figure out the timing and post battle results and boss sequencing and

interconnection another early boss battles can be found in kung fu master this is the true level boss it literally is the boss at the end of every level it also creates anticipation using the enemy health bar that is visible throughout the valley there's the ending boss which I played bubble bubble multi-plate times I never reached level hundred and I didn't even know that had a boss but there are few but a few games in history that had a single boss but there's also the intro boss this is fury from 2016 which is I think a perfect way of introduced the game and by starting with a bang really so instead of having endless cutscene telling you what to do you can start with the boss teaches you everything that you need to know this is

nemesis or from all throughout l-3 you battle nemesis multiple times and in completely unexpected timing every time so it creates this linger anticipation this long engagement this choice of timing as we've seen in Bioshock you choose when to engage your first Big Daddy and it has so many four results or later Chrono Trigger from 95 had a particularly interesting way of giving you a choice of timing the timeline in which you engage with La Voz is really changes the outcome and there are 13 different endings based on on the timeline going back to Psycho Mantis again there's so many things to analyze in this battle but one of the things that there's small because that I really enjoy is the fact that how they connect apocalypse environment so the boss even using prognosis if it attacks me with

picture frames and dangers once again the great mighty poo well connected to its environment taxi with poop and you retaliate by throwing an oversized toilet paper into its a gaping mouth [Music] alright so connecting the boss with the minions that's pretty obviously creating at this unified approach we remember even from Super Mario Brothers that the Bowser is actually the king of the Turtles and visually looks connected to the minions to some of them although another anecdote is that originally it was designed by Miyamoto as an ox only to be challenged and changed later

looking again at Super Mario Brothers the connection between the boss battles basically you're you're battling Bowser every time with slightly increasing difficulty so and every time you were sent to a different castle but some games really make a point in creating this in this laboratory and interconnection between the different bosses this is undertale and every boss creates has a connection both narrative lee somatically even in terms of UI to the previous bosses and users all everything that you learned from previous losses and eventually challenges every everything everything so every boss feels like embraced some rule that would establish [Music] this is the spider from limbo I definitely believe it's a legitimate

boss and you can you battle it multiple times in the first part of the game and again there there are plenty of cases where a single boss can be a challenge in multiple times and in every every challenge presents a different skill and we're gonna talk about skills in a moment personally my my second boss in mushroom 11 was a direct tribute to the spider boss in limbo including the part where you you use the spiders body to move over the acid pit which is a quick point that I wanted to make in mushroom 11 the after you defeat the boss there's always an additional challenge that you need to cross you need to physically cross over to the next world which I thought was a pretty interesting and clever but to be honest this is not something I would do again because when the player believes that or they see

that triumph they believe that they can proceed to the next level and instead we're challenging them and immediately throwing them back into a new challenge kind of watering down this excitement satisfaction wouldn't wouldn't hurt to just continue automatically or find a different way to present this challenge all right skill mastery and teaching so we're going to talk about the skills how can you sign a challenge to test a specific skill and how to increase the difficulty in combine multiple skills and of course the undivided attention that we have to teach new skills this is the first boss from shinobi again that I really like that boss is pretty much a test for jump and shoot and it's basically a skill gate for that specific skill if you don't know how to jump and shoot you will survive a minute in the next level so making sure that you're

ready for what's next this is a father gascoigne from blood-borne and another game with investment losses so father gascoigne is essentially a skill gate or parrying and allows you to attempt the basics before increasing the difficulty of course it's not always physical skills this is a theand from the vault of glass this is essentially the ultimate test of the communication skill on collaboration between raid members one of my favorite things is when bosses actually teach you and you a new skill this is king bomber for me super mario 64 we are using this undivided attention and notice traveling around the boss to teach you something you which is something that very very important when you're teaching do not

have distractions and introduce new skill this is a the skill is grab and throw we're basically providing a reason for you to utilize that new skill this boss particularly does a very clever psychological flipping trick of climbing because if you don't know what you need to do you can just sit back and see the boss doing the same thing and that climbs [Music] once again this is the chain from fury the intro boss I think bosses are perfectly capable of introducing this basic mechanics in this case this is this boss is the first thing that you see and teaches you all the basic mechanics and buttons and skills this is a very memorable boss the first boss from archetype one of my favorite bosses and it uses a great way

of intricate of implicitly teaching you and human enemy technique in this case the force pod that you need to send to infiltrate it has this curvature there that keeps the four spot in the center right in front of the weak point and by seeing the effect using honey tines advisors retained observe result in that way you reinforces the teaching of using the this is Ruby weapon from Final Fantasy seven uses a great way of introducing a modified skill in this case a handicap this is the world sander it's an attack that takes party members of your of your of the game and really changes the way you interact with the boss another interesting handicap is the last boss in Shadow of the Colossus following the tragic loss of your horse aggro you

don't have the speed and capabilities that the boss allows you to do so you have to use evasion and stealth first phase of the battle increased risk this is the last boss in Sonic 2 [Music] in this case the entire level does not have any rings which creates these though in case an illusion of risk and the boss feels much harder which is a bit kind of a different way of playing this is Berserker in a game to the first person shooter is the third person sure where all you need to do is hunt down enemies in this case you can't do that you have to lure the the enemy to follow you around into the light to be hunted down by the hammer of dawn death ray and this is Ray from uncharted 4 and a lot of bosses can use playable cutscenes

basically which open up infinite opportunities introduce different skills this is not exactly expected but this is this battle has its basically a glorified sword fight using two buttons this is Gladys [Music] portal which introduces a new constraint isn't the time constraint or at least if explicit time constraint that was not also slauson's allow you to hear James multi-skilled combining with multi into one epic battle this is weekly from Perl to Whitney forces you to use all the different games that you learn to row going back to Shadow of the Colossus this is a faced set of skills every face has a different unique skill that he

tests the first part forces you to shoot down the sacks making sent dragon drop down the second part is all about timing and speed third party ages are holding onto the body of the mr. Freeze's for one of my favorite classes again from the Arkham series this one also tests different particular skills but gives you the choice of how to how to introduce them you choose when to try out every different a skill and once you do the boss even tells you that you cannot use that is going to be protected from that which is I believe a great way of testing out their skills and of course the side skills in a game that's all about you know space space battles in this case the skill is to get a triple seven in space in metroid prime

which is a 3d action-adventure game you get kind of a glimpse to a different game spider guardian is basically a 2d puzzle game which is again something that only a boss battle can do to think about it my favorites this is the bride from this disclosure man this is a sight skill that's a tribute to hacked him again this is basically a tribute to punch ow and this is from last year dr. Robotnik's mean bean machine from sonic mania which is another glimpse to a different game a game with the same name which is essentially a session of football all right let's move on to the actual

confrontation right so design attacks attack patterns around the tested skill that we've just established and how to really encourage interaction between the boss and the player Jack eula from Castlevania is the boss that basically tests jumping and hitting from very close range now in order to to support that skill the attack pattern is uses the negative space that is left by that skill and and shoots enforces the player to get very close to to the boss and jump over it so if you think about it we are using and complementing the skill that we've established cuphead last year I did a fantastic job pretty much every loss in establishing the skill a specific skill and then creating a negative space that forces you to interact in a certain

bosses if motels like Don infatuated katsu is a great example of the idea of the negative space because if you think about and as we can see the boss can kill you whenever they want if the designers you wished to kill you they would just shoot an endless amount of bullets or speed but in this case we are actually trying to not kill them where we planning we're planning how to keep them alive and you can see that even resent the bullet hell there are paths that are allowed for the player to use so that's what we're planning we're planning with the path another great example is from contra pretty much a lot of the bosses there create the idea of the counter-attack so you are attacking

the boss as they attack you and that creates kind of an aquatic justice of course but also there's a there's an element here that's very useful for designing a boss which is creating this short time window and a limited space which forces us to have this confrontation and the cycle of evading and attacking we saw the kink Obama and 64 this is this DS version which is pretty much exactly the same idea it teaches you how to grab and throw but it uses a completely different way it throws a bomb at you which I get it is kind of a cliche of bosses but it it with this deflection that it requires puts the player in the line of fire and create forces this interaction between the boss the player one of my favorite bosses

the eldest is a twin rova which again creates forces this interaction between you and the boss says in this case you deflect the attack of one sister against the other one of my favorite bosses you see [ __ ] from bayonetta in another game with fantastic bosses in this case it's another type of counter-attack it creates a path by attacking it creates a path for its own destruction another version of that can be found via dial crash bandicoot warp you lure dingle dial to shoot at you a path and you can see also that the arena in this case was perfectly tailored for this specific battle which leads us to the arena layout again we're trying to create an arena that complements the battle and is based on that specific fight this is

cyberdemon from doom from 2016 in both phases of the battle the arena is very small open no place to hide kind of reminiscent of all the olden times as well and it increases the confrontation and if in further so during the second phase it uses this temporary layout change that even it creates this Lane that restricts your motion and makes the confrontation even more more obvious but the idea is that the arena is always designed and tailored to that specific boss battle this is a boss that moves extremely fast and is partially invisible you don't know where the by looking where the attacks come from you know where the boss would be and also

they made a lot of fences and barriers that you can or to protect your support also a bunch of different hubs for interactions [Music] lighting can also be used as a great way of introducing a layout in this case the boss inspector Specter night boss and shovel knight uses the shadows to hide and if you haven't noticed how it moves in the first phase of the fight you wouldn't even know so teaches and then tests your ability and one of the most important points in boss battles is the attack space and I'm referring to the idea that you can employ multiple approaches and/or strategies against the boss I think a good boss can be beaten in multiple ways or at least different players can interact with it in a different in different way in this case this is orange Stein smile from Dark

Soul in a fantastic boss that is particularly remembered because of the two bosses every one of them is quick and weak and the other one is very powerful and slow and you choose how to interact with that boss and a new form your own strategy I'm not I don't I'm not a huge RPG player but this is also a memorable boss battle this argument from Dark Dragon Age Origins also known for its various different strategies can be used in order to beat the boss once again Big Daddy it's one of the first games that allows you to have the appropriate different approaches and multiple emergent behaviors you can beat Big Daddies by using shotguns electricity telekinetic telekinetically moving booby traps and even hypnotizing one Big Daddy against another all right

moving on to clarity we need to make sure that we avoid unpredictability obscurity and randomness by setting clear goals progression in hits and predictable attacks so the idea of a clear target is very obvious we all know that we kind of gotten used to the idea of a glowing weak spot which creates a clear vulnerability and a call to action there's even a funny article from the onion exactly on that creating a clear call-to-action is extremely important this is an example from Shadow of the Colossus particularly when you have a large boss with multiple weak points essentials the force forces us as designers to create some sort of guidance as needed in this case the sword that lights up the the next target in some cases guidance is not needed this is a dark clink you don't need to

know particular its particular weak spots because it is you you know its strengths and weaknesses did remind me of mirror prints from Prince of Persia the the first phase the first part of the game you create this mirror prince by going through a mirror the second part you have to battle it and in this case the challenge is a logical challenge figuring out how to beat it by lowering your sword and moving and this is the puzzle battle and I really enjoy bosses that are employing logic and figuring out the goal is the challenge this case and and one thing that's very very important and I can talk a lot about this and I don't the idea is that you either employ logic or skill but try to avoid you the same goes at the same exact time the reason is what I call the Delta of chance and I'm gonna talk about that later Delta of

chance is that when you believe that you've succeeded and then immediately fail because there's an additional challenge or in vice-versa that creates a very unsatisfying moment clear progression we we talked about the glowing red point which creates a focal call to action we can also see that this particular game and most game of the time we have a the clear hit you can see a couple of frames that change the color and but also of course the health bar which we've all grown accustomed to in many bosses not every boss has health bars in some cases we don't really need it as long as you have a clear understanding of how far you've got me this is the first phase of hive mind in dead space there are a couple of odds that you five posit you need to destroy and by seeing how many you have left you

we have a clear understanding of the progression early in the early games this is a space area they use them weird wrinkles changing the color of the box as they use health but that trippin be long gone minutes your visual design abilities an interesting aspect a way of presenting your progression is done in cup head so instead of showing you the progression during the battle they do it when you die which if you think about it's actually quite clever because this is where you you potentially lose players just before a potential rage quit they can see how far they've gotten so that's a very interesting prospect and also shows you the face which gives you even further indication of where you are talking about cup head it's incredibly important to have a predictable attack because

predictability is controlled and when you know how the bullets are the many different boards or attack types go in the next frame you have control over the battle and as long as you have information in time to react you can beat any boss some bosses kind of put you in a position where you don't have enough time this is again the first boss shinobi which is notorious for its randomness in the attacks I think in this case they actually wanted to create this panic in order for to force the player to use the magic but generally randomness is very risky going back to space harrier another in theme for interesting point is that while including is very clear to see an AK coming it's very clear to extrapolate its position in 3d it's not that easy

we're I think we evolved in a way that a change in scale is not that visible some games as something to game to do it better so going back to cyberdemon as long as it's visible enough that something is going directly at you and then you should be fine in this case the flare behind the rocket gives you just enough information to know if an attack is coming directly at you another cool trick from the Bob with Barba's fight it always attacks you sideways and then clamping towards you again giving you just enough information and time to react but you don't always have enough information or time to react a time to react so you have to compensate with

enough information the the pre-emptive shadow as I call it here is highlighting where the hit is going to this is both the fireballs and the bombs as well so and if you think about it it's kind of compensates for the lack of information that we as the spectators have if Mario can look up and see the the bombs falling we don't have that luxury so by providing that guidance it gives us just enough information - this is hell-blade and in hell-blade of course and many other games they use pre-emptive animation it gives you well enough time to see when and where the next attack is coming by having this animation of of the enemy also here's another cool trick to introduce this this telegraphing by actually literally

saying that the talk attacks are coming behind you using the voices in cinemas ahead which I thought is brilliant this is a launcher door from Rayman legends it uses multiple telegraphing methods you have the shadow that gives you information on the position of the location of the attack and the animation for the timing so with animation with the timing and the position you have just enough information to respond another cool telegraphing method using the master hand in Super Smash Brothers throughout the series these kind of implicit hand gestures give you enough information to know when the next attack is coming once again Rafe and other battles in the franchise if you notice just before the hit lands it slows it down just enough to give you time to react which is some

sort of telegraphing but kind of changing reallity slightly this should be fun so the first battles in punch-out they start pretty slowly they have a lot of math pre-emptive animations giving just enough time to respond but as the battle is progressed and it gets harder and harder you have less and less time to react and in fact the Mike Tyson battle doesn't really give me enough time to respond to any attack and the only way you would know what to do is by observing the previous attacks and time with them and memorize them and basically anticipate in order to survive because the previous waves Telegraph's the next waves and that's what you see also in cuphead in many many times the first attack but in this case the egg is extremely risky you don't even know what it does in fact if you're in the wrong place you you would die first time you see it but once you see it once you know how to react the next time and if this

happens to constantly in this game it works very well for a game as you know a lot of things attracts a lot of deaths this is a less common example this little horn from Super Meat Boy this entire boss is built on an authorization it has 13 different stages that you need to memorize each one in order to survive which works very well for this game because this game is all about dying multiple times all right let's move on to difficulty hmm all right we're going to talk about della Delta of chance which I mentioned before and the fact that we are here to reward and not to punish so the Delta of chance if you look at any phase or any even attack type in a boss or any any any kind of interaction with an enemy you usually see or you better see a

challenging peek followed by a foreseeable end you can actually see where it's gonna end and in noticeable easing between them and the idea of Delta of chance is that well a positive Delta of chance puts you in a position where you see an anticipated failure and heightened risk followed by an anticipated triumph not immediate triumph but an anticipated triumph and that translates directly into the behavior of dopamine now I'm not chemist about canister but from it's pretty recent that they studied this newer transmitter and realized that its behavior really rewards and encourages behavior to leads to a positive change in your in your behavior and there's always kind of a a low dosage of dopamine that changes Peaks

when you have this positive Delta of chance and completely stops when you have the negative Delta chance kind of in the evolutionary way of teaching you how to work and advance in the world in our world you can kind of imagine that if you think about playing game of Tetris where you can see that you're almost going to fail and then you see that the next piece is a long piece sometimes you would want to kind of wait and extend that amazing moment that you know that you've just survived and that feeling is what I believe is one the most important and one of the biggest takeaways I think you should have from this talk is and this is something that I also learned kind of recently because I made a gain that is extremely difficult you probably know that the idea of making sure that there's a challenging peak followed by a anticipated anticipated triumph is extremely important and I can see this

in pretty much all the good bosses that I surveyed and this is one of the reasons why this boss is so wonderful because every attack wave has a very challenging peak right in middle of that attack you are attacked by multiple different pieces you are forced in this very narrow space and once you survive this you start seeing less and less pieces coming towards you and they get more anticipating you see where they're coming cuz those are their only ones left and there's a good one second where you know that you survived a very difficult challenge and that the second is extremely addicting and satisfying and I think this is what we're looking for a great example is an intruder from Gradius - the first part is a one single fire snake and then you hit it and it splits into three that moment becomes extremely difficult but once you hit one

snake and then the second one you know that you survive it the last part last few seconds are just very very easy so you have a few seconds of this wonderful satisfaction another great way going back to hivemind the first phase of the battle after you removed every destroyed is a third pod you're picked up always by the tentacle and at that point it seems like it gets a little harder because you're airborne it's harder to aim but really there is no risk anymore because you're not subject to the attacks of the tentacles so subconsciously you know that you beat the first phase and those few seconds of new aiming are very satisfied now this is not exactly a boss this somehow keeps coming back over and over again

the favorite bosses this is a song from 2003 and I started looking at it and try to figure out why people like it so much and mention it as a boss and it had the same traits and qualities are the good boss it has attack waves that hiking towards a very challenging crazy peak and once he reached that peak and cross it it starts slowing down towards this satisfying moment where you can just kind of rest you know the next and also very member izybelle because it's a song you know how to do this alright let's quickly talk about multi phases now there's a notion of creating phases just in order to extend the gameplay and this is something that I really don't enjoy I don't think that creating a long boss battle is something that extremely important it's not a way for you to extend how how long people

play your game you are here to reward the player and provide some in this case break before increasing the difficulty slightly or or change the battle or change it to a different skill I also suggest you know taking into consideration the Delta of chance so make the break more anticipated and something apply some easing towards it some great examples for phasing as we've seen with the sand dragon where each phase introducing a different challenge this is a great boss battle from your automata from last year so she the first phase you have this four year old that protects the boss you can't attack it but you can learn how it moves the second part where they turn off the power you can actually attack it but you don't really see very well so those are those two phases really complement each other very well and last example from

the Arkham series this is Ra's al Ghul where each one of the phases changes the rules completely that's the oversized boss then gravity or multiple instances so I think that idea is that every phrase can break the rules in a different way now let's talk a bit a little bit about the difficulty level and pacifism a lot of games introduce multiple difficulty level four throughout the game you can change it you can adjust the entire game becomes easier cuphead actually allows you to change the difficulty level per boss there are the bosses that give you the idea of non-fighting option or maybe this is the basic option but in any case whether or not you fight the boss the challenges still maintain

different challenges you have the fire and fire flower then you get the boss you don't have it you're using timing instead and again not the idea that non fighting options can still maintain some challenge can be seen in master from fallout in certain circumstances and if you go through a specific branch of the dialog you can actually convince master to self-destruct and avoid a very very difficult battle and if you think about it it's not that you skipped the bat at the battle you just you create a different challenge for yourself it's more a logical challenge than than a physical one and a great example is through undertale there are many types of confrontations and confrontations can can end without a fight in fact there's a true pacifist route that is also considered I think as the true ending for the game that you can just avoid

fighting all the bosses and and the challenge is still there it's it's a slightly different challenge there are other games that allow you to skip bosses because again this the boss is a reward if the player so chooses they can just avoid the battle in this is spire the dragon where we can use collectables to progress and you know go through the balloonist you can just avoid the battle if you have enough of the thing that you're collecting and it's all about if the player just enjoys collecting but they don't enjoy fighting then that's their choice and finally monster hunter world the whole point is that you choose the battles you you take thorn quests and it's all for your own personal advancement it's the the battle is a reward is it's part of the game it's not a punishment that you have to endure in order to to get to the next world so a

couple of words on skipping so you need to ask yourself when you design a boss is this boss essential to the progression does it teach you something that you have to learn does it make sure that you're not gonna be hurt later and if not then are you really excluding unable players that you considered as non deserving you remember that the battle must be rewarding but players can enjoy different types of challenges so I urge you to consider easy mode or alternate challenges for example I can definitely see start designing bosses that can be either challenged physically or logically and both both ways are completely acceptable and of course even skipping the boss because it's the player's choice if you want you can always award the main path with special items or access to different in

different parts of the map if you so choose or even different endings as we've seen with some other games and if you think about it it actually increases your replay value because if you let the players go all the way to the ending they would enjoy and probably want to return to the bosses again play them in like the original main path it also exposes more people to your art and this is a personal you know personal thing for me because I I spent around two months working on an ending for mushroom 11 that only less than less than 10% of the players actually reach because the bosses for example and other challenges were extremely difficult and and most importantly this allows us to really work towards true inclusiveness and well not scaping on the actual challenge so in summary I'm just gonna call this out real quick these are their rules

reward tell a story locally source skill test and intro do not try to kill keep everything clear allow player expression during the battle phase wisely mind the difficulty curve in the Delta of chance and of course most important in boss battles rules are meant to be broken thank you very much if you have any questions you can line up front of the mics if we have time yeah three minutes hey um so you went over a lot of I've seen what the best bosses in games are but what are the worst tropes that you would consider so this I had a bunch of those and and just as respect

to my fellow designers I try to avoid showing too many bad examples I touched on couple things that I found not as useful I showed I think some of the bosses in shinobi for example kind of implemented some things that I would not necessarily implement in my own games and again I didn't want to talk about this too much but some of the bosses and the challenges in my own game were extremely difficult and this is this all has been a personal learning for me figuring out how and what makes a good boss battle so I I think I would definitely say my own game has some flaws so you mentioned having an easy mode for skipping really or some way skipping really hard bosses but easy mode has a little bit of a stigma if with a lot of players is there a different way that that could be presented than just saying easy mode for

bosses so actually one of the things that I try to kind of mention in my final slide there is that we actually need to battle the stigma sure I mean we can figure out other ways of introducing easy mode and I I do agree that I don't like I don't like using UI to tell you what you're playing this is kind of puts you in the mindset this it Prime's you into thinking that you're actually not as good as you are by just saying the word easy so that's that's a really important point and I do agree with you however the idea that we need to care about what some people say because they don't feel that other players deserve to play the hard mode is something that we as designers need to challenge oh hey great talk yeah so breath of the wild my experience with that was I played as much of the game as possible before getting to the final boss and the final boss was super short because I was way overpowered and

I find I felt like I sort of missed the intended experience all right at least I felt as if I it wasn't as satisfying for me have you thought about this and what are your thoughts I hated that fight it was I we were very and me and Julian we played it together and we got to the boss with a lot of power and I I actually didn't like that battle too much I thought he was I thought it was I know laid out in a way that was a kind of extending too much I and I actually like most of a lot of the boss battles that Nintendo has that kind of have everything very later laid out very well where every phase has a different challenge and I think maybe part of the thing and to be fair one of the amazing things that I love so much about breath of the wild is that you can you can have multiple approaches to every single thing but the problem is that you can't

balance everything to the maximum so in some cases there are some strategies that are just better and you probably found those and I didn't and I'll ask you what he did later but honestly I I think this really allows this elaborate expression space for the players so in some sense you just I think maybe you played it very well and you missed some of the things part of the challenge so in a game that's focused around boss battles like Shadow of the Colossus how would these rules change how do you continue to teach win or connect to the minions when there aren't minions sir just bosses so that's that's actually a great example and I was trying to not go over too many things because already I had fifteen slides basically idea of boss rush and games that only have bosses

I think Monster Hunter is a great example of kind of the nonlinear way of giving you the choice of when to challenge a certain boss but in this case the way I see Shadow of the Colossus is that really if you think about it every every boss or every Colossus his is a is a level and that level usually has multiple different challenges throughout that level and usually towards the end of the level for example the head of that monster that's the boss if you think about it but each one of them and that's something that I enjoyed tremendously in that game is that each one of those bosses interesting introduces something else so I thought I thought it'd worked out for that game I hope it answers your

question first of all I think you can be forgiving this of is highly insightful speech now earlier during the talk actually at the very beginning you did mention Silent Hill Homecoming and that got me thinking how exactly do you try to get boss fights right in a survival horror game which emphasizes tension through a tight resource management also feelings of occasional health lessness and powerful powerlessness that's that's a great question and to be fair I only played a few so what I what I felt is that in terms in terms of the boss battles in Silent Hill really I what I saw this is that in a group a great example how the theme really worked out with the mechanic in this case as you said yes this this this anxiousness this

pressure that you feel while playing it really gets calm by the visuals in some way it could have been by the way just as useful if you think about it if this would be a kind of a you know happy you know smiley face but but the idea of creating this this perfect you perfectly unified set of behaviors and mechanics that support the technology to support the mechanics that supports the visuals I think I think that worked out very well I'm not sure if I answered your question no but no I think you're answered it there pretty well thank you thanks thanks again as well and you put a lot of work into that which is fantastic we went through a whole lot of examples the majority of those examples were single-player boss battles your rules change is your focus change when we're looking at multiplayer and particularly more than just two

people attacking a boss I think this is this is a great example but if you think about it actually answers the same the same question because you need to ask yourself what are the skills that you're trying to trying to challenge so I don't think I would be able to play a thean very well I know I wouldn't so so this is one of those things that as I'm seeing other people play it I can see how they created a set of challenges that particularly there and not in other bosses necessarily to to challenge the collaboration for example in a lot of bosses in in destiny you can see where but with where other players are so they created this time poll so you couldn't see that so it so for every different for every different skill you create a challenge kind of the negative space so it's easy to talk about negative space in 2d games or 3d games where like I'm

you know I want you to jump so I'm gonna shoot a couple of times to make sure that you jump as high as possible but also if you if I want to challenge your collaboration then I'm gonna put the players in the position that they can see each other I know hey so how would you handle having multiple like a boss battle in a game that has it's like a hero based shooter or something like that so for example if overwatch had a boss battle and you could choose any of their 24 characters like assuming that the design philosophy is not the limit player choice in which characters they can bring into that battle so I can you can you repeat that question I think I sure yeah just it's a pretty vague question but like what are some ideas on how you would handle a boss battle that like where the player basically has too many options available and how they could

approach the battle I think that's a great point because I was talking about the player expression space is something that is underutilized right now a lot of bosses that the expression space is limited to you know am I going to jump over to bullets or one bullet at a time and I showed the Ornstein and smile from Dark Souls which gives you this idea like okay I'm gonna go go through this one first and lead when you have too much choice you have you no choice paralysis so I add in some in some way I think that's also kind of the art of designing and and to be fair I think when that's why I led my my talk here to talk first about the the skill set that you would like to challenge once you establish a skill set or a multiple skill set but but there has to be some sort of clarity in what you're checking what you're choosing what you're presenting what you're challenging the

player with I think that just presenting too many different things kind of puts you in a point where the player would be helpless in a sense so I think again that's that's part of my point I there's no perfect way to tell you how to design a boss like how do you place the bullets what kind of you know how it moves from side to side how do you know that you attack towards the player or towards where they're going all these things are are you know eventually it's the the art of designing but in a sense just having the clear view of what you're challenging I think that's extremely important and that needs to be limited but not singular alright I think we're out of time so thank you very much [Applause]