The boss battle is a staple of the rpg genre, and in fact, most action games. It's important because it's a break from regular combat and a challenge for the player, often a storyline event or just a chance for a cutscene too.
The boss fight is often highly pattern based. Personally, I find that this pattern approach is...lacking. It requires the player to think once, then exploit the pattern until the boss is dead. Usually, mind. The pattern can be good, sometimes, and this will be discussed later.
So I want to try and think about the ways we can approach the bossfight to make it more interesting.
Some ideas:
- Varying the pattern.
- A weak spot on the boss's body.
- A constitutional weakness
- Puzzle!
- Environmental exploitation
- Or, failing all that, your boss could just be a super tough enemy which the protagonist has to smack into submission.
Now, the specifics!
Variance
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Variance is quite commonly used to make the bossfight more interesting. The most obvious example:
1. Run into the obvious little trap and shake in your boots as the boss descends.
2. Establish what the pattern is and exploit that until the boss's health reaches a certain level.
3. Oh woe! The pattern changes, making the boss a little bit harder to kill (or easier, if you can survive the new aggression)
As you can see, I'm not terribly fond of this. So, take your standard health based pattern. Now let's make it a little bit more interesting:
1. Run into the obvious little trap and shake in your boots as the boss descends.
2. Figure out the boss's pattern and exploit it.
3. Run out of mp. Cue a pattern change (which, if you're being nice, should make it a bit easier to take him without your skills)
4. Figure out the new pattern, exploit.
5. Now the boss runs out of mp! Time for another pattern change (this should make the boss stop using skills, or you could just render him useless until his mp recharges)
6. Figure out the new pattern, exploit.
7. Now when the boss's hp reaches a certain level, he goes RAAAH and tries to kill you in super-aggressive pattern. Hopefully you can survive
Now, this still isn't terribly interesting, but you can see that there's a lot of things you can use to base your variance off. Suppose the boss runs out of mp before the player? You could have a different change in the pattern there and a whole other event. But why stick to mp? If the player switches weapon, uses a certain skill, if a certain amount of time passes, it's all cool. Try making a bossfight where the pattern changes on every hit and you'll begin to see the possibilities.
Bodily weakness!
In case of giant robot ninja attacking, climb onto its back, use a flathead 0536 screwdriver to open the panel and cut the blue wire, followed by the other blue one.
This is, honestly, not that interesting. It becomes more interesting when you add a pattern so that the weakness is only vulnerable at certain times. But still, been done before, many times, right? Now say you can only hit it with a certain weapon. But then you go stabstab and something changes and now you can only use another weapon! In this case, you must disguise the weapon's identity in a way that makes it challenging, but not impossible to figure out and you must also make sure that figuring it out is doable with a giant monkey trying to eat your brains.
Constitutional weakness
Early on in my game, Gauge Wielder, you come face to face with almost the most powerful enemy in the game, a drakon. Naturally, if you just run in there, you won't stand a chance. You'll be eated and munched on and if you're really unlucky, digestulated.
So, rather than rush in headlong, you go off and do your research. Turns out drakons are highly lactose intolerant. Who knew, eh? So you go through a massive series of quests to obtain some milk, then find a creative way to slip the drakon some of the stuff. If you're a real bastard, you can coat your weapons in the stuff for super drakon abuse. Do this and the drakon falls in a matter of seconds.
This takes advantage of both ways to play the the constitutional weakness card: passively and aggressively. Passively is something that takes effect before the battle (feeding the drakon his medicine) and aggressively is during (coating your weapons). Interestingly, with the passive card, your protagonist doesn't have to go into battle if you don't want them to. There's lots of creative opportunity here, so have some fun with it.
Puzzles!
Push buttons a, b and c in the correct sequence while boss is on spot x to cause pain in significant amounts.
This is a nice one because it's very rarely done. However, you have to come up with interesting puzzles otherwise it defeats the purpose of originality (otherwise known as copying less widespread ideas
). I can't think of much more to say on thise one, but I'm sure there is.
Environmental exploitation
OMAIGAWD! HYDWA COMING TO KILL ME! *Leads hydra over the spikes of hydra killing*
And that is environmental exploitation in a nutshell. Find something in the environment which makes owie. Lead the boss onto owie-tile. Watch boss get owie (And try to not get one yourself) Again, more to say here, not sure what.
Smacking
Face it, you don't *have* to make your boss radically different from the grunts. It could just be bigger and tougher and rawrier. You could just resort to this for your small dungeon bosses if you're stuck for ideas.
Now, the thing you want to do here is to mix these concepts together to create some interesting bosses. Not just rely solidly on one. Or if you can think of any, coming up with more concepts is even better. So go forth and innovate!