A guide to videogame Boss Design

Bowser, from the Super Mario franchise (Nintendo)

About the author

I am Cristian Palos, student of the Bachelor’s Degree in Video Games by UPC at CITM. This content is generated for the second year’s subject Project 2, under supervision of lecturer Ricard Pillosu.

Introduction

Since their very first appearance in 1975, Bosses became one of the most important and iconic elements in videogames, even surpassing in some cases the figure of the main character.

As new videogames appeared, every single designer wanted to create a Boss as succesful and charismatic as Bowser, as memorable as Ganondorf or as imposing as the colossi in Shadow of the Colossus.

But, where do you start? Which are the steps you have to follow to create a successful Boss? In this article I’ll try to throw some light into the design process of a Boss, remarking which are the most important elements to take into account as well as some mistakes designers usually make.

Types of Boss

First, let’s see some definitions. Depending on their role, Bosses can be:

Mini-Boss or Sub-Boss

They are not “Bosses” as we all know, but exceptionally strong enemies that tend to appear in the middle of a level.

Big Daddy, from the Bioshock franchise. (2K Games)

Secondary or Optional Boss

Secondary Bosses are those Bosses that do not pertain to the main plot line of the videogame. Generally, they can be fought by the player if they fulfill some conditions, like simply finding it, getting “x” object and going to “y” place, talking to a certain NPC, etc.

Seconary Bosses can also be used to expand the world in which the game takes place.

The Nameless King, from Dark Souls 3. (From Software, 2016)

Main Boss

Bosses which affect directly the development of the plot of the game and can’t be avoided to reach its ending.

Final Boss

The Final Boss of a videogame is also a kind of Main Boss. It differs from the rest in the fact that it generally appears more than once throughout the whole game, which creates a deeper relation with the player.

Ganon, from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. (Nintendo, 1998)

What do boss battles mean for players?

Feeling of Mastery

Boss fights have a unique feeling among all battles in videogame. They are distinct to normal battles in the sense that they do not aim to serve as learning tools or to test if the player can use new skills, they serve as challenges to test whether the player has mastered the previously learned skills in the game or not.

Ideally, players should use all the things that they have learned previously to the boss during the battle and, when defeating it, they should feel like the really do master those skills.

For example: In “The Legend of Zelda”, players obtain new skills in almost every new dungeon they visit. Since the very first moment they obtain that new skill, it is required to use it to go through the final steps of that dungeon. This progression culminates with the Boss fight, where that new skill is absolutely key in order to defeat the Boss.

In the first dungeon, the player finds the Fairy Slingshot, the first new mechanic introduced in the game

During the Boss Fight, the player has to shoot it down from the ceiling by using the Slingshot

Once the Boss is on the floor, the player can attack it directly

(All images above pertain to “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”, Nintendo (1998))

Reasons

It is important to know that players do not play a game because they have to, the play because they enjoy playing. Thinking on optimal ways to engage the player is one of the most difficult things to do when creating a videogame, but it is also key to guarantee its success.

With Bosses, we find exactly the same thing; players need reasons to fight a Boss, reasons that make them feel that they are not wasting their time.

Here’s a list of possible reasons you may base your Boss designs on:

• Loot: Generally used in Secondary Bosses. As simple as “you defeat that big boss, you get this powerful weapon”. Genres like MMOs are highly centered on this kind of Boss design.

• High Difficulty: May not be liked by everyone, but an exceptional difficulty can be the only reason to fight a Secondary Boss, or can be an extra reason to prepare to fight a Main Boss.
  Dark Souls is well-known for the difficulty of its Bosses, which has attracted more players to the game (Ornstein and Smough - Dark Souls, From Software(2011))

• Unlocking next areas: Which can be extra areas (in this case we are generally talking about Secondary Bosses) or areas according to the plot of the game (in this case, Main Bosses).

• Plot-evolvers: Exclusive for Main Bosses. As its name states, defeating these kind of Bosses makes the plot advance.

• Emotional: Can be used for both Secondary or Main Bosses. Players have some kind of personal link with the Boss that pushes them towards fighting it. A really good and clear example of these kind of Boss is Red, from Pokemon Silver/Gold/Crystal.

For the player, to face Red does not only mean to defeat the strongest character in the whole game, but to overcome themselves, as they are basically facing their avatar in the previous game. This link has turned this optional fight into something almost mandatory to any Pokemon fan. (Image from “Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal, Nintendo (1999-2001))

Designing a Boss

Although there’s nothing like a magic formula to create easily the perfect Boss, there exists some aspects that well merged can put you in a good spot to accomplish this difficult task.

Purpose

The first thing to have in mind when designing a Boss, is its purpose. This is probably one of the most important steps in the design process as we are basically creating the “pillars” on which the entire Boss fight will be based.

This process is divided in 3 steps. To illustrate them better, let’s go one by one following an example from “Hollow Knight” (Team Cherry, 2017).

• List of the skill to test: Bosses are like tests for players, so the first thing to think about is what is going to be tested with this boss.

Let’s say for example we want to test the jump mechanic of the main character.

• List of attacks or challenges that will test that skill: Now we have decided what to test, we have to think how to actually test it.

In this step, it is recommended to think of those challenges independently to avoid limiting our ideas on the actual design of the boss.

One of the False Knight’s attacks is a heavy smash which sends out shockwaves. The player has to jump over them to avoid damage.

• Adapt to the theme of the boss: Now we have our designed attack, we have to adapt it to the actual aesthetic of the boss.

How could a heavy smash to the ground be done? Why not trying with a giant mace?

Preparation

As mentioned when talking about the Feeling of Mastery section, Bosses are like tests to the player to ensure they master a certain degree of skill. Knowing that, a Boss Fight should not be the moment to introduce new abilities or mechanics to players, as they would need to adapt to them during the fight itself.

Instead, it is better to introduce those new abilities or mechanics during combats with regular enemies, as they are (generally) less punishing than boss fights.

Difficulty

Many designers, when creating their Bosses, ask themselves “How do I make my Boss challenging without overpowering it?”. Well, to create a good difficulty curve for a Boss is not an easy task, but there are some things to take into account:

• It should adjust to the player’s current state of development in the game, in a natural way. It means that:
  • Bosses at first stages of the game should only challenge the basic mechanics of it, as it’s all the player will have learned up to that moment.
  • Bosses near middle stages should test that players know how all learned abilities since that moment work.
  • Finally, Bosses near the final stages should not only test that, but also the optimal usage in conjunction of all the skills and the ability of the player to overcome the challenges presented during the fight by using them.
• It should stay faithful to the gameplay difficulty; it has no sense to introduce an extremely difficult boss in a suitable for all audiences game.

The kind of Bosses in Super Mario Bros would feel out of place in a game like Super Meat Boy, known for its high difficulty. (New Super Mario Bros, Nintendo (2006)/ Super Meat Boy, Team Meat (2008))

• Althought it is not strictly mandatory, Main Bosses should increase, in terms of difficulty, throughout the game.

• In order to avoid making the player feel overwhelmed by a constantly increasing difficulty, Secondary and Mini Bosses can escape from this small rule and act as “rest” moments.

• Difficulty is not only reduced to increasing stats. Optimal difficulty comes from constant challenges.

How do we ensure that the difficulty degree of our Boss is on coherent parameters? A good way to check the quality of our actual design is by iteration sessions with users (playtesting), from which we can gather really useful data of certain factors.

For example: Let’s say we have designed a Final Boss with three different phases. In our playtesting session, with a total amount of 20 users, we’ve obtained the next results:

So, according to the results, only 10% of the playtesters defeated the Boss, which a quite small percentage of success. Now, to go further into the data analysis, we can check two more things; from the percentage of players who have not been able to defeat the Boss, in which phase have most players been defeated, and from the percentage of players who have been able to defeat the Boss, how many tries did they need in order to do it.

In this case, we get the following results:

Graph representing the playtester who were not able to defeat the Boss

Graph representing the playtesters who were able to defeat the Boss

With this information, we can see that:

• The majority of the playtester who were defeated by the Boss, were defeated during the second phase. This informations serves as identifiers of possible mistakes we may have done while designing the Boss. What we would do now, is to revise the second phase looking for what is creating that excessive difficulty peak.

• From the 10% of users who defeated the Boss, 50% needed a single try and the other 50% needed 3 tries. Although this information is not as useful as the information of the players who failed, it is interesting to have into account this type of data when analysing a Boss.

Music and Sound

Music and Sound may sometimes go unnoticed by the player during the Boss fight. However, this is not a reason not to put effort into creating a good audio to fit your Boss design.

Music is a powerful tool to create feelings in the player. A good battle theme is the one that flows with the battle, the one that increases its pace when the battle does too, and decreases it when the battle slows down. Having a good design accompanied by a lack of music or a repetitive, generic one, can ruin all your efforts and turn, what should have been a good battle, into something dull.

Anyone who has ever played Final Fantasy can recognize Sephiroth’s theme just by listening a few seconds from it. Same applies with San’s theme, from 2015’s Undertale.

However, having a great battle music is not enough if it is not appropriate to the theme of the boss or the game. The theme has to fit with the scene, or it will only give the sensation that the music is there because someone in the team liked it.

The same applies with Sound effects. Having a big, heavy-looking Boss accompanied with non heavy-sounding sound effects may be confusing to the player. Be coherent with this!

Visual Design

Bosses should stand out from any other kind of enemy on the map. They have to be easily recognizable by the player, as they will focus their attention on them.

Usually, what most designers tend to do is to make Bosses considerably bigger than regular enemies. This way, the player can distinguish it perfectly, and it also creates another interesting effect; the sense of facing something more powerful than you, something always present in the Hero’s Tale.

This sure does not look like a regular enemy, does it? (Shadow of the Colossus, Team ICO (2005))

General mistakes when designing a boss

We’ve been learning that players in general want a game that rewards them for thinking and doesn’t penalize them for meaningless randomness… We’ve been learning that players embrace a challenge and don’t mind failing as long as the failure seems fair.

Raphael van Lierop, founder and game director at The Long Dark studio Hinterland.

More HP, more difficulty
One of the most extended mistakes when designing Bosses, is to think that increasing the amount of HP they have, will instantly increase its difficulty. In some way, it does, but what we are doing here is creating artificial difficulty, which does not improve the gaming experience of the player in any sense.

Combats with this kind of bosses tend to result tedious and repetitive to the player, which is something designers should avoid.

• How to fix this?: Bosses surely have to last enough in alive in order to show their strategies to the player, however, only increasing its HP is not an optimal way to achieve it. Try adding some original gimmick to the Boss that takes the player by surprise and breaks the monotony.

Strange gimmicks not explained to the player
A classic mistake among unexperienced designers is to think that anything goes when talking about originality. When designing, in this case, a Boss, we all try to be different from the rest and try to come up with a great idea to blow up the players mind. This is a dangerous moment, because it is easy to jump from a good, original idea, into something completely the opposite.

Introducing strange gimmicks during Boss battles without giving any hint to the player to overcome them, is not a good design flow. Players need to feel they are in control of the situation or, at least, that they have the tools to respond to unexpected moments.

Ruby Weapon, in Final Fantasy VII, is completely immune to damage unless you enter its battle with two of your team members dead. This, of course, is not even explained to the player inside the game. (Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft (1999))

• How to fix this?: Strange gimmicks are OK, as long as they are explained to the player. Introduce small hints or visual elements that help the player to discover how to actually beat that gimmick.

Randomness
Randomness can be a powerful tool, but also a dangerous one. It is used in party games to reduce the skill gap between players, as party games aim for the spontaneous fun and not for the correct skill development of the players.

Randomness in videogames has always existed, but the incorrect use of it has a negative impact on the experience. Imagine an RPG Boss that each turn had a 50% chance to knock one of your team members down. Sounds funny?

When fighting a Boss, players should feel like they can always win if they make the right decisions with the tools they have. Adding a high amount of randomness would break that feeling and would probably frustrate the player.

• How to fix this?: Reducing the randomness level of your Boss is the simplest way to fix this problem, as a certain degree of randomness in battles is commonly accepted as it adds a degree of indetermination. If the element with randomness degree can’t be reduced, consider removing it.

Breaking the Game rules
Breaking the Game rules means to do the opposite the player has been taught during the whole game. Let’s directly jump to an example: Marie, the final Boss of the History Mode of Skullgirls (Reverge Labs, 2012).

Marie, from Skullgirls.

All the previous fights to her, are regular fighting-game fights, where you learn the basics of the combat system.

However, against her, none of that works; she can’t be stunned, grabbed (not even by Blockbuster moves) or launched. Besides, She attacks from so many different ways at the same time, making it difficult to avoid, specially because some of those attacks require fast movement reaction, which not all the characters have.

As Marie is basically static in the screen, the player can not predict her next move. All these elements removed the strategy component of the fight and turned it into a Heavy-attack-spam.

Marie is not affected by hitstun and can throw atacks from so many different directions, making it almost impossible for the player to predict her.

It is important to keep in mind what your game rules are when designing a Boss, and to be faithful to them.

• How to fix this?: As said above, respect the rules of the game when designing a Boss. If you find yourself with a Boss that breaks the rules of your game you only have one solution, get rid of your current design and start from zero.

Boss Fight

The “Pre-Boss” area

In order to anticipate a Boss battle, designers often create a “Pre-Boss” area where the player can basically recover and prepare for what comes next. The player can “feel” when they will have to face a Boss because of certain elements of level design, like save points just before entering a new area, conveniently placed Health recoveries or Weapons or suspiciously large, empty rooms.

These elements are small hints that reveal to the player that they will face a Boss in the next area. This preparation is a rewarding element for the player, as it prepares them for the fight and builds up their expectations.

The Fight

Boss battles should, or at least try to, constantly challenge the player in new ways. They should constantly represent a threat to the player and keep them concentrated during the whole battle. Thus, players should not get comfortable when fighting Bosses and should consider going through new strategies in order to get the victory. However, they should not achieve that result by introducing unknown mechanics, but combining those already presented to the player.

Another important thing to have in mind is that Bosses should have enough durability to be able to show all their strategies and gimmicks. But be careful with the way you create that durability, or your Boss could suffer from one of the problems discussed in the General Mistakes section.

If you want to create a Boss with high durability, a good way to avoid making the player feel bored is to use a classical resource; phases. By dividing the fight in several phases, the player has resting moments during one phase and another and the moveset change also creates the effect of being in a completely new battle.

The final battle against Sephiroth is split into three different phases, with significant variations in his moveset and strategy. (Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft (1999))

Finally, players should not be able to surpass the Boss strategy by pure luck. The design has to ensure that the player knows which strategy take to defeat the Boss and how to actually perform it. An example of that are the Bosses in The Legend of Zelda franchise, where the player has to repeat the same procedure three times to defeat the Boss.

The Combat Stage

The combat stage is not only the physical place where the battle takes place, but also another element players can interact with. Traditionally, Bosses have been placed in large areas for two main reasons:

• As in the visual design, it transmits to the player the feeling that they are facing something bigger than them, something special.
• It allows many different gameplay mechanics, which enriches the variety of the combat. An example of this gameplay mechanics could be to interact with specific elements in order to damage or weaken the Boss.

The fight agains Ceadeus in Monster Hunter Tri is in an ancient temple under water. There, the player can attack the monster with some powerful weapons located over the stage. (Monster Hunter Tri, Capcom (2009))

Some games have given a twist to that traditional choice and have opted for smaller stages. Why? Because playing with space is a powerful tool to make boss fights interesting. Bosses like Onryoki, from Nioh, can almost reach every point in the stage with one of his attacks. The way to actually beat him, is to make precise and timed usage of the rolling mechanic.

Onryoki’s stage is considerably small taking into account its attack range. (Nioh, Team Ninja (2017)

However, small stages can be a double-edged blade if there’s no meaning on reducing it. If reducing the size of the stage creates the feeling in the player that the fight is “unfair” or “not well-thought”, then you probably should think twice before doing it.

The Capra Demon’s stage is a well example of a bad execution of small stages. It is easy for the enemies to hit you just by entering and the entire fight is reduced to “exploit” the stairs. (Dark Souls, From Software (2009))

Post-Battle: Rewarding the player

Fighting the final Boss is the climax of the game, all the entire journey has taken place only for this moment.

Defeating the Final Boss is a key moment in the gaming experience and players should feel like they really have achieved something out of normal. Specially with Final Bosses, players should see the result of all their effort in someway, so finishing the battle and seeing nothing more than a short cutscene would ruin all the greatness of the moment.

Players want to know how their actions affected the world. What happened to the main characters? Is everything better know? Has nothing changed after the journey?

Right after defeating Demise, we can see this scene where Link, Zelda and himself are cursed to reborn and fight again and again, starting the eternal fight that distinguishes the saga. (The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Nintendo (2011))

Useful resources

Articles

Engaging the player in fun, appropriately challenging, and climactic fights

What makes a successful videogame Boss?

Designing a Boss Fight: Lessons Learned From Modern Games

How to Make a Great Boss Battle

Boss Battle Design and Structure

7 Essential Ingredients for an Unforgettable Boss Battle

Videos

Good Game Design: Bosses

How Cuphead’s Bosses (Try to) Kill You