5 thoughts on “Gamasutra Boss Battles Article Published”

  1. Hi Mike,

    I read your article on Gamasutra and I really liked the way you approached the boss fight as its own narrative. I’m a Level Design student at the the Guildhall at SMU and the ways in which narrative and story integrate into a game is one of my passions so I was glad to see the way you broke down the 8 beats of the boss battle. To me, this helps in looking at games as always telling a story even in a “pure” gameplay situation like a boss fight. Thanks for the article.

  2. Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it. The topic of story AS gameplay is one that’s really interesting to me, and one I think is going to be coming up a lot in the near future.

    Again, great to hear from you!

    ~Mike

  3. Great article, Mike!

    It’s interesting to note that half of the 8 beats don’t even involve the boss fight itself. 1-2 and 7-8 are all outside the fight proper, but are just as needed to make the boss feel plugged into the game as a whole.

    I will say that going all in with the boss beats does limit the number of bosses you can reasonably put in front of the player. Partly because of how much time it takes to do step 1 properly, but also because you can only do the build up-fight-release process so many times before player fatigue becomes an issue.

    Also, thanks for using my Tachyon boss as an example for the ground based ring! That was fun to see.

    -Sean

  4. Thanks, Sean!

    It’s true that you can end up going crazy with the investment into these beats, but sometimes you can go with the “less is more” philosophy and get a lot out of that.

    Mega Man is a good example of that. The build-up is the airlock hallway that leads to every fight (plus the level select and level-intro sequences). The intro is them appearing with some freeze-framing. The Kill sequence is just a cool death effect of them exploding and the victory sequence is when you pick up your new weapon.

    Their re-usable beats for 1,2, 7, and 8 minimize the cost of the theatrical portions of the boss fights, but they still remain effective. Then, for their more important fights (like Protoman or Dr Wiley) they do a bit more expensive theatrics to show the player how much MORE hardcore those bosses are.

    And as far as Tachyon goes, that’s one of my favorite ground based rings. When I was trying to think of an example to use, that was the first one that came to mind 😉

  5. I’m glad you liked it, since a LOT of people hated it. It was (and looking back this wasn’t exactly fair to the player) the only attack in the game that required you to use your helipack-jump to avoid.

    Of course, since they never had to helipack jump in that way before many players thought his ring was just not avoidable!

    And you bring up a good example of the minimalistic way of doing the pre- and -post fight boss beats using Mega Man, thanks!

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