Who's the Boss?
Hey, Tyler here! Part of the work over the past month has been rebalancing and reworking some of the existing bosses in the game, (mostly ones in the middle third of the game, as everything in the first third is pretty well tuned at this point). Believe it or not, not every boss we make works well on the first try. Crazy eh? So I'd figure I'd go over a bit about what makes a good boss in this type of game and how we approach rebalancing and reworking and testing existing bosses, for a little bit of development insight here.
So lets start with what makes a good boss in Mewgenics?
Well, a boss's roll in any game is to test a player in the skills that they should have acquired at that point in the game. For Mewgenics there's 2 major categories of skill to test here, your tactical decision making, and your ability to build a team. For early-run bosses, the only thing we can reasonably test in a boss fight is tactical decision making, as you haven't had that many teambuilding decisions yet. For later bosses, they need to also be a test of your ability to build a functional team.
Now, Mewgenics is a Tactical Strategy game, so you need to be able to use strategy and tactics to beat a boss. The ones that work are the ones that let you do this, and the bosses that "don't work" typically feel more like "big meatbags" where you just hit them and hope you kill them before they kill you. Those bosses fulfill the role of a gear check (testing your team building skill) but fail at properly testing your moment to moment tactical decision making. That's no good, and the bosses that feel like that get added to the queue for a redesign. We've gotten better at this as we worked on the game, but probably about half of the bosses have needed at least a minor redesign to make fun.
Unfortunately most of the bosses I was working on this month are all past the spoiler wall so I can't show them. But I can use examples of other bosses we have shown before, which went through tweaks, redesigns and rebalances in the past.
He throws bombs. They explode. You can dodge the bombs, or tank them, or use an attack to defuse the bombs instead of hitting the rat, or try to manipulate the rat into getting hit by his own bombs, or try to burst down the rat before the bombs even explode, or stun him so he can't throw bombs, or understand how how AI works and try to manipulate where he throws the bombs, or any number of other things. This is what a good early game boss is like.
Radical Rat was the very first boss I implemented into the game, way back in 2020. His mechanical design has remained essentially unchanged since then, with mostly just small changes to health and damage, and a few visual updates. It was unclear to a lot of people that you could attack the bombs to disarm them, so we made the bombs look like little rat heads to make them seem more like an enemy you can kill instead of an inanimate object, along with tooltips and some other hints about that. With that fix, he feels like the perfect "first boss" now.
Radical Rat also had one problem that wasn't apparent when he was first designed- if it was raining when you reached him, his bombs would just get automatically defused by the rain the instant he threw them, and it was no longer a fight at all. He had no other way to damage you besides those bombs. So we gave him an alternate behavior where if it's raining he just chucks the bombs directly at your face instead! Take that!
Boris was the *second* boss I implemented into the game. His original design had him moving around trampling and dashing at you, and he would fart on you and dash away if you hit him from behind. He had a lot of HP but took extra damage if you attacked him from behind. This version of Boris was just... not fun. He was a big meat bag and there wasn't all that much decision making in his fight. There wasn't any easy way to dodge his attacks other than staying away from him, and all you had to do was just hit him till he died.
When it came time to put Boris in context as the boss of the Sewers, it was immediately clear that his design wasn't good, and that he would need to have a bit of a redesign. There was over a year between implementing him and actually having him placed into his spot in the sewers, so by the time I had to revisit him we had made a lot more enemies and bosses and content in between. As such the first step for this redesign was to just, cut all the mechanics off of him that we no longer used anywhere else in the game. So his "butt takes extra damage" effect is gone (no other enemies are "extra weak" to backstab like this), and his fart clouds are gone (the cloud layer ended up not being used because of visual overlapping issues). With those removed, his "dash forward when hit in the butt" effect didn't feel right anymore, as it was too easy to work around (just dont hit him in the butt at all), so that was cut.
With that stuff cut all that was left of the fight was just Boris moving towards you and occasionally dashing through your team. He needed *something else* to make the fight actually good. But there's an issue, he already had his animations made, and animations are the most time consuming part of development. So whenever possible, these redesigns need to use existing animations instead of requiring new ones (This more relevant for the later spoiler bosses that I can't show, who have quite insane animations, which makes tweaking and redesigning them quite interesting). Boris doesnt have any sort of melee attack or spit attack animations, he just has move and dash. So the thing I ended up doing was giving him a reaction that makes him move 1 space towards you whenever you damage him. Boris has Trample so he can run over you and your teammates as part of this reaction. And it didn't need any new animations!
The movement reaction really makes the fight into something great. It's an incredibly dynamic and fun fight now. Instead of being able to just beat on the meatbag until hes dead, now you have to consider positioning with *every* attack. You can use cheap weak attacks to bait him across the map away from your team, or stun him so melee attackers can get free hits in, or just tank his trample damage and hit him from up close, and you have to make sure he wont trample over your other cats when he moves towards you. Its crazy how such a small change turned Boris for a boring meat bag into one of the most fun fights in the game. He's remained mostly unchanged since then, aside from some balance number tweaks.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We've made a lot of bosses over the course of making this game, and one of the things we noticed was that if a boss is designed from its own perspective, meaning, the design is "what the boss does", it usually doesn't work well right away. "He jumps over here and then punches you and then does a cool mega attack", those kinds of designs work fine in an action game like The Binding of Isaac, but the bar for what makes a good fight in a tactical game like Mewgenics is a lot higher than that. Fights like that are not made from the correct perspective, and fixing them requires reorienting and designing from the player team's perspective instead. "OK to fight this guy you can do A, or B, or C, and have to consider X and Y when doing so" and making sure that the boss's abilities and skills are designed to foster those sorts of decision trees instead of just "looking cool and doing stuff".
A lot of our later bosses do just start out as "Looks cool, random bullshit go!". One particular one we had in place (which I can't show, because spoilers) was *so cool looking* that most of our beta testers reported it as a high point of the game when they first reached it. But the fight itself didn't quite live up to how cool the boss looked. It again just played out like a "Big Meatbag" fight. We're not content with visuals being the only cool part about a fight, so this was one we had to rework last month. It's an interesting challenge figuring out how to change a boss in a way that requires as few new animations as possible, and sometimes requires a whole day or two of brainstorming to really nail down what it needs. It's absolutely worth it though, and we've been able to fix every boss we needed to, often taking them into "this is one of the best fights in the game now" territory.
There's a few general classes of boss mechanics we have that often result in interesting tactical decisions on the player's part, and after having made ~50 bosses/minibosses so far we were able to pick out some of the things that differentiate the good ones from the ones that needed work. "Reactions" are a big category, Zodiac's "shoot anything that moves", Boris's "Move towards whoever damages you", and Chubs & Nubs' "spit-when-hit" are good examples of reactions that make for fun and interesting gameplay, and sometimes the way to fix a boss is just to give it some kind of interesting reaction to play around. "Multiple Targets" is another one, where simply having multiple different things to pay attention to and consider how to prioritize fighting can be fun, even if the individual targets are fairly basic. "Keep Away" is another one where the boss has a sub-goal they want to accomplish (like reaching a specific object on the map) and you have to consider how you can prevent or delay the boss from reaching that goal. There's a bunch of others, and combinations of these also work well. Maybe we can talk more about it all once the game is released and I don't have to avoid spoilers!!!
We have ~3 more bosses to animate, and I have 5 more bosses and 6 more minibosses to implement. Some of them (and some of the existing ones) will still need tweaks and adjustments.
Anyway here's a trailer update from Edmund:
As mentioned in previous posts due to the LA fires our trailer has been delayed slightly, Flynn is fine and working hard on polishing up the trailer as I type this! This teaser is a fun one, totally breaks all the rules of video game trailers but does feature a lot of gameplay footage in rapid succession so we have also spent the last week recording said footage and pruning it down to the most spicy bits!
here is a teeeeny tiny snipit of the trailer for your eyeballs!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The trailer will def be done by mid/late march but with GDC and april fools around the bend im not 100% sure if we will release it till our next update in april.
Stay tuned!
So lets start with what makes a good boss in Mewgenics?
Well, a boss's roll in any game is to test a player in the skills that they should have acquired at that point in the game. For Mewgenics there's 2 major categories of skill to test here, your tactical decision making, and your ability to build a team. For early-run bosses, the only thing we can reasonably test in a boss fight is tactical decision making, as you haven't had that many teambuilding decisions yet. For later bosses, they need to also be a test of your ability to build a functional team.
Now, Mewgenics is a Tactical Strategy game, so you need to be able to use strategy and tactics to beat a boss. The ones that work are the ones that let you do this, and the bosses that "don't work" typically feel more like "big meatbags" where you just hit them and hope you kill them before they kill you. Those bosses fulfill the role of a gear check (testing your team building skill) but fail at properly testing your moment to moment tactical decision making. That's no good, and the bosses that feel like that get added to the queue for a redesign. We've gotten better at this as we worked on the game, but probably about half of the bosses have needed at least a minor redesign to make fun.
Unfortunately most of the bosses I was working on this month are all past the spoiler wall so I can't show them. But I can use examples of other bosses we have shown before, which went through tweaks, redesigns and rebalances in the past.
Radical Rat
He throws bombs. They explode. You can dodge the bombs, or tank them, or use an attack to defuse the bombs instead of hitting the rat, or try to manipulate the rat into getting hit by his own bombs, or try to burst down the rat before the bombs even explode, or stun him so he can't throw bombs, or understand how how AI works and try to manipulate where he throws the bombs, or any number of other things. This is what a good early game boss is like.
Radical Rat was the very first boss I implemented into the game, way back in 2020. His mechanical design has remained essentially unchanged since then, with mostly just small changes to health and damage, and a few visual updates. It was unclear to a lot of people that you could attack the bombs to disarm them, so we made the bombs look like little rat heads to make them seem more like an enemy you can kill instead of an inanimate object, along with tooltips and some other hints about that. With that fix, he feels like the perfect "first boss" now.
Radical Rat also had one problem that wasn't apparent when he was first designed- if it was raining when you reached him, his bombs would just get automatically defused by the rain the instant he threw them, and it was no longer a fight at all. He had no other way to damage you besides those bombs. So we gave him an alternate behavior where if it's raining he just chucks the bombs directly at your face instead! Take that!
Boris
Boris was the *second* boss I implemented into the game. His original design had him moving around trampling and dashing at you, and he would fart on you and dash away if you hit him from behind. He had a lot of HP but took extra damage if you attacked him from behind. This version of Boris was just... not fun. He was a big meat bag and there wasn't all that much decision making in his fight. There wasn't any easy way to dodge his attacks other than staying away from him, and all you had to do was just hit him till he died.
When it came time to put Boris in context as the boss of the Sewers, it was immediately clear that his design wasn't good, and that he would need to have a bit of a redesign. There was over a year between implementing him and actually having him placed into his spot in the sewers, so by the time I had to revisit him we had made a lot more enemies and bosses and content in between. As such the first step for this redesign was to just, cut all the mechanics off of him that we no longer used anywhere else in the game. So his "butt takes extra damage" effect is gone (no other enemies are "extra weak" to backstab like this), and his fart clouds are gone (the cloud layer ended up not being used because of visual overlapping issues). With those removed, his "dash forward when hit in the butt" effect didn't feel right anymore, as it was too easy to work around (just dont hit him in the butt at all), so that was cut.
With that stuff cut all that was left of the fight was just Boris moving towards you and occasionally dashing through your team. He needed *something else* to make the fight actually good. But there's an issue, he already had his animations made, and animations are the most time consuming part of development. So whenever possible, these redesigns need to use existing animations instead of requiring new ones (This more relevant for the later spoiler bosses that I can't show, who have quite insane animations, which makes tweaking and redesigning them quite interesting). Boris doesnt have any sort of melee attack or spit attack animations, he just has move and dash. So the thing I ended up doing was giving him a reaction that makes him move 1 space towards you whenever you damage him. Boris has Trample so he can run over you and your teammates as part of this reaction. And it didn't need any new animations!
The movement reaction really makes the fight into something great. It's an incredibly dynamic and fun fight now. Instead of being able to just beat on the meatbag until hes dead, now you have to consider positioning with *every* attack. You can use cheap weak attacks to bait him across the map away from your team, or stun him so melee attackers can get free hits in, or just tank his trample damage and hit him from up close, and you have to make sure he wont trample over your other cats when he moves towards you. Its crazy how such a small change turned Boris for a boring meat bag into one of the most fun fights in the game. He's remained mostly unchanged since then, aside from some balance number tweaks.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We've made a lot of bosses over the course of making this game, and one of the things we noticed was that if a boss is designed from its own perspective, meaning, the design is "what the boss does", it usually doesn't work well right away. "He jumps over here and then punches you and then does a cool mega attack", those kinds of designs work fine in an action game like The Binding of Isaac, but the bar for what makes a good fight in a tactical game like Mewgenics is a lot higher than that. Fights like that are not made from the correct perspective, and fixing them requires reorienting and designing from the player team's perspective instead. "OK to fight this guy you can do A, or B, or C, and have to consider X and Y when doing so" and making sure that the boss's abilities and skills are designed to foster those sorts of decision trees instead of just "looking cool and doing stuff".
A lot of our later bosses do just start out as "Looks cool, random bullshit go!". One particular one we had in place (which I can't show, because spoilers) was *so cool looking* that most of our beta testers reported it as a high point of the game when they first reached it. But the fight itself didn't quite live up to how cool the boss looked. It again just played out like a "Big Meatbag" fight. We're not content with visuals being the only cool part about a fight, so this was one we had to rework last month. It's an interesting challenge figuring out how to change a boss in a way that requires as few new animations as possible, and sometimes requires a whole day or two of brainstorming to really nail down what it needs. It's absolutely worth it though, and we've been able to fix every boss we needed to, often taking them into "this is one of the best fights in the game now" territory.
There's a few general classes of boss mechanics we have that often result in interesting tactical decisions on the player's part, and after having made ~50 bosses/minibosses so far we were able to pick out some of the things that differentiate the good ones from the ones that needed work. "Reactions" are a big category, Zodiac's "shoot anything that moves", Boris's "Move towards whoever damages you", and Chubs & Nubs' "spit-when-hit" are good examples of reactions that make for fun and interesting gameplay, and sometimes the way to fix a boss is just to give it some kind of interesting reaction to play around. "Multiple Targets" is another one, where simply having multiple different things to pay attention to and consider how to prioritize fighting can be fun, even if the individual targets are fairly basic. "Keep Away" is another one where the boss has a sub-goal they want to accomplish (like reaching a specific object on the map) and you have to consider how you can prevent or delay the boss from reaching that goal. There's a bunch of others, and combinations of these also work well. Maybe we can talk more about it all once the game is released and I don't have to avoid spoilers!!!
We have ~3 more bosses to animate, and I have 5 more bosses and 6 more minibosses to implement. Some of them (and some of the existing ones) will still need tweaks and adjustments.
Anyway here's a trailer update from Edmund:
As mentioned in previous posts due to the LA fires our trailer has been delayed slightly, Flynn is fine and working hard on polishing up the trailer as I type this! This teaser is a fun one, totally breaks all the rules of video game trailers but does feature a lot of gameplay footage in rapid succession so we have also spent the last week recording said footage and pruning it down to the most spicy bits!
here is a teeeeny tiny snipit of the trailer for your eyeballs!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The trailer will def be done by mid/late march but with GDC and april fools around the bend im not 100% sure if we will release it till our next update in april.
Stay tuned!