It’s been quite some time since my I last worked on boss battles, and much has changed. My old experiments were heavily inspired by shmups, which I’ve found don’t translate overly well to a twin stick shooter. It’s simply not possible for a twin stick shooter to create shmup-style massively complex bullet patterns that require micro dodging, as it is not possible to control the enemy placements to the same extent as in shmups. This issue is lessened with a single boss character, but that precludes the use of supplementary non-melee enemy types to flesh out the encounter.
Shmups also work because they force a constant tradeoff between offense and defense, because the ship only shoots forwards. In contrast, there is significantly less of a risk-reward factor for positioning in a twin stick shooter because you can just aim pretty much wherever. That stops being true when we start placing cover, making the arena larger, design proper enemies, etcetera, but once we adopt these twin stick designs it becomes much more difficult to borrow specific attack patterns and designs from existing bosses in the shmup genre.
Having said all that, there’s one extremely strong argument in favour of this kind of boss, which is simply that it serves as a strong change of pace. As a result, I’ll almost certainly make one of the bosses in this style, although it will probably be an easy, throwaway middle of the game boss.
I recreated the above fight in the current game, substituting in the gay tech bro vampire himself, and added a little pre-fight pageantry. I’m reworking the actual battle, but it will remain in its original style, which is very shmup inspired, and requires lots of micro dodging. It’s fun enough to serve its purpose, which is as a fun little set piece that breaks up the monotony of the regular levels.
Low res gif really messed up the text.
While the Mecha-Soros boss was at least interesting, the same cannot be said for Mecha-Greenblatt, which is basically just a failed experiment. My original idea was to test whether a boss that spewed asynchronous projectiles everywhere would be fun to play against, and the result was pretty mediocre. I’m sure the execution could have been better, but this was enough to teach me that the concept itself is just not that great. The more the boss moves around, the less complex bullet patterns work, and the more it should be designed like the other enemies.
Which is the other viable style of boss, a normal enemy, only stronger. This has the added benefit of working well with the existing enemies, who can be added to the encounter in whatever numbers I like. It’s also an opportunity to flex my AI programming wings.
I’ve been somewhat disappointed that, for gameplay purposes, the common enemies have to end up being quite simplistic. The more complicated they are the more unreadable and unpredictable they are, which leads to worse gameplay. In contrast, a boss can be given a plethora of offensive and defensive options, and more complex behaviour. Placing sentries down, mining areas, teleportation portals, numerous different projectile attacks, statically placed spells, retreating to get shields back up, lasers that cut off movement, summoning allies, modifying terrain, etcetera.
The shmup rework should be done and shown on the site tomorrow and I’ll go from there.
