There may be someone out there who finds designing boss fights easy but it’s not me. It’s difficult to strike the right balance between challenging skilled players without overwhelming less experienced ones, making the battle feel both intense but still fun, making it difficult for the player to “cheese” the boss fight, and making it feel unique from other boss fights without being gimmicky. With all that in mind I spent a lot of time working on the “Zealot” boss fight these past two weeks. If you’ve completed the demo of Reina & Jericho then you’ve defeated his partner, the Inquisitor. This is important because the two should feel somewhat related but be tactically opposites. The Inquisitor possesses the artifact that grants Reina the ability to dash. When she fights the Inquisitor, he has it and she doesn’t, so he’s the one dashing around all over the place, moving at a speed Reina cannot possibly keep up with. Instead of relying on physical ability the player is forced to pick their moments and rely on timing and their ability to maintain space. The player can attempt to force an attack, but the Inquisitor can force one right back in a fraction of the time. It is a fight less about attacking the opponent in terms of chasing them down and is instead more about punishing the opponent when they are in reach. The problem is when Reina defeats the Inquisitor, she gets his artifact and now *she* is the one who can rapidly move around, dashing in and out of attack range in split-seconds. I’m a fan of it, as it really opens up the game and establishes Reina & Jericho is a good speed game, but it means the fight with the Zealot, who *should* be similar to the Inquisitor, has to be designed very differently. Reina can get into and out his attacking range with almost zero effort, so how do we design this new boss fight? In some regards we lean into the fact that it is a mirror image of the Inquisitor fight. Reina can dash in, but the Zealot has a good mix of quick attacks and slower ones with a ton of power. This means strategically the player is now susceptible to the same strategies they used to win the fight against the Inquisitor. Rushing in for attacks might work against a few of the Zealot’s moves, but overcommitting can lead to Reina taking a big counterpunch that launches her across the map. The other idea I am exploring right now, with I think is critical to all boss fights, is the concept of restricting movement. The game is about movement (and most games are), but in a boss fight it’s not entirely appropriate to let the player move about wherever they want, however they want – the battle has to at least take part in the space the player is able to safely navigate. If the player can run and jump wherever they want, then there isn’t really a fight. [img]https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1157800/extras/reina-zealot-spacing.gif[/img] Sometimes the solution can be as simple as putting a dangerous spike in the middle of the arena, other times it is making attacks have a large (and maybe long lasting) area of effect – the important thing is that the player has to be fighting not just the enemy, but the space they need navigate as well.