Defying Gravity: Designing a Boss Battle Part 2

The second boss battle I made was the final boss for the game. The final boss is Comrade Black the notorious villain of both de Blob and de Blob 2. The time frame I had for completing the development of this battle was only a quarter of the time I had to work on the first battle, so we had to finalise the design in a very short time frame.

He's really small!

My original concern was that Comrade Black was too small and that players wouldn't feel threatened by him. When I say too small to be a boss, he was the same size as all the other generic Inkies and therefore did not stand out in anyway except for his large hat.

So we decided to have the Hypno Ray, scale Comrade Black up reminiscent of the Pillsbury Dough Boy in Ghostbusters. It was the best solution for two reasons, the first was because it overcame the size problem and differentiated him from the ordinary inkies. Secondly because it also solved the issue of him blending into the background.

A major decision in the design of the battle was to use a puzzle to ultimately defeat Comrade Black. This was consistent with the previous de Blob battles and allowed for players to test their experience. It also differentiated de Blob battles from other platformers that use direct hits on the boss as a mechanism for defeating them.

The brief focused on developing combinations of hazards, enemies and power ups to be used to ramp up the action and difficulty of the battle as it progressed. The other request was that you should finish with something really fun to reward the player. Immediately I knew that I couldn't break this into the tried and true 3 phase battle. So I made a table that linked the power ups with hazards and enemies that they'd be useful against. It also conveniently fitted into 7 phases with the 7 colours I wanted to use.

Colour	Power Up	Enemies	Comrade Black Attack	Hazard
Yellow	Nill	Nill	Cannon	Nill
Red	Haz-Mat	Inky	Hypno Disc	Spikes
Blue	Haz-Mat	Inky Baton	Cannon	Spikes
Green	Regen	Elite Primary	Electro Ball	Heat Plates
Purple	Regen	Elite Secondary	Hypno Disc	Heat Plates
Orange	Super Charger	Spikies	Electro Ball	Electro Plates
Brown	Super Charger	Nill	100 CB's	Nill

The ideas were for each stage to get the colour from the outside and deliver it to the central beam. This used the same path system from the Mungo Battle, thus saving time in implementation with the benefit that players are already familiar with this mechanic. As the paint gets added to the Hypno Ray, colours are injected back into the world, whilst simultaneously destroying Comrade Black and the Hypno Ray. Everyone knows that when you mix all the primary and secondary colours you get brown, and so we decided that this was fitting to be the last colour for the player's coup de grace of Comrade Black. On this stage the player has the pleasure of stomping on 100 Comrade Black clones.

Designing this boss battle required me to work closely with the programmer on the states and triggers I would need for the battle. Below is the state chart that we came up with.