Design Problem:
We wanted to end the first level of Shadows of Dawn strong to give the player a taste of what to expect from the world we are building. The goal was to create a boss fight that gives the player a glimpse of the creatures they'll find in the world and show them the strategy required to overcome them.
The Boss:
Our first boss is a mutated beetle named Ringo. Our goal with Shadows of Dawn is to bring RPG puzzle solving into the FPS experience. That was my primary goal in designing Ringo. I Taking inspiration from the exoskeleton beetles naturally have, I thought it would make an interesting challenge to make it fortified by the mutation so it repels the players bullets. To do damage to Ringo, the player must destroy the four crystals growing out of his back. Doing so stuns him for a few moments and opens a spot on his carapice that will take damage. After a delay he will recover and regenerate a new set of crystals. At 50% health, Ringo becomes enraged and takes flight to alter his attack patterns, but the damage process remains the same as before.
Behavior System:
The Final Fantasy and Dark Souls series have inspired me to work in games and I like to pay hommage to them when I can in my designs. Phased boss fights are some of the most intense encounters in those games and I wanted to bring that intensity to shadows of Dawn.
My experience with C++, blueprints and behavior tress in Unreal Engine made collaborating with our engineering team easy. Makring up a Miro board to help reflect my thought process for Ringo's behaviors helped to streamline their development process and allow us to move into testing quickly.
Iteration & Playtesting
Our early playtests showed us that Ringo was moving way too fast and hitting way too hard. He wasn't rerolling his attacks effectively enough and would only repeatedly use one if the player was close and one other if they were far. This lead us to working in some weights and delays on the attacks in addition to expanding the potential distance pool for the attacks.
These changes gave us the exact room we needed to have an interactive battle with Ringo instead of immediately dying after his introduction scene. The new challenge was fine tuning his poison attacks. One, a lingering mist deals poison damage to the player while in the cloud, the other is a poison spit attack that includes a projectile that does direct damage, splash damage and leaves a pool on the ground that will do poison damage over time if the player steps in it. Both were doing too much damage over time and would leave the player desperately close to death with little window to avoid or recover.
Collaborating with Animation
Collaborating with our animator is an iterative process that requires a lot of communication. Throughout the playtesting process we have sat together to discuss and work on updates. We have been tuning the creature's locomotion focusing on turn rates and modifying the anticipation frames for Ringo's attacks to give the player some more cues for incoming attacks.
Multiplayer
In co-op, taking on Ringo is just as challenging and immersive. His behaviors encourage players to work together to flank and out manuever him to expose his weaknesses. His AoE attacks help him combat multiple players at a time by stunning them with his screech or sectioning off areas of the environment with his poison mist and spit attacks.
