In my time at Bluetongue Entertainment I was the level designer for the boss battles that are found at the end of the tenth and twelfth levels of de Blob 2. The first battle we referred to as Mungo aka The Monster.
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| Mungo! |
The brief was that this level would feature a character, Mungo, that was basically the anti-blob. Mungo's objective is to destroy things that are brightly coloured, he targets objects that have been painted by Blob in a indiscriminate way. Like a crazed raging bull, it only sees colourful objects and will target them at all costs, to the extent that it would sometimes put itself at risk.
I therefore translated the brief to mean that the boss battle would require the following:
- Mungo would attack colour;
- Mungo is bigger than Blob; and
- Blob would need to be faster and smarter to defeat Mungo.
Some of my initial ideas involved a bait and chase strategy. I liked the idea of Blob being the bait and Mungo following him to a point where Blob could trap and defeat it. Here is an early sketch I made, outlining this idea.
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| Early Design |
These initial sketches gave me a rough idea of what I wanted Mungo to do. I used these as a platform to begin briefing the programmer, in my experience I found a state chart the most helpful tool to do this. It also allows a designer to foresee potential issues in the design, and provides for the opportunity to remedy them and communicate developed ideas to the team. The state chart is provided below.
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| Mungo State Flow |
Eventually the design for this battle developed from a circuit based challenge to a path based challenge. The design naturally evolved this way to better engage the player in the battle. The end result was that Blob had to paint the path with Mungo hot on his heels, at the end of the path there was a hazard where Blob got to directly employ damage on Mungo. Below is an example of the later designs.
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| Follow Blob Path design |
In the end we went with less symmetrical holes and more complex paths, including some that branched to either a hazard or ink pool. The final battle can be found in a previous post here
