About

The final boss fight and ultimate challenge of the game. Mega Buff tests the player's mastery over all gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as their knowledge of enemy types, attack patterns, and the ability to adapt and react to different combinations of arena configuration, environmental hazards, and active attacks.

On one hand, this fight presents slightly empowered versions of offensive mechanics that players already know from enemies, level hazards, and previous boss fights, allowing them to quickly know how to deal with each attack. On the other hand, the twist is that this fight is designed to randomize the attacks on each stage, mixing up the arena configurations, environmental hazards, and active attack mechanics in such a way that players will always find the same versions of all attacks in any given stage, but in a different combination and at different times.

As mentioned previously, one of the main mechanics for this fight was the rotating arena, which would incorporate a brief platforming challenge at the start of each stage and was designed to keep players moving and alert at all times.

For this mechanic to work, I designed a multi-core system that would have four parent cubes (cores) with the arena's rows, columns, and planes attached, along with a master core that could rotate the whole arena at the same time. This system allowed for quick iteration of arena patterns as well as difficulty balancing.

Above: Design document for the "Mega Buff" boss fight.

Below: "Mega Buff" boss encounter flow chart detailing the fight sequences and attack randomization.

This mechanic, however, along with others such as the "Plasma Surge", "Plasma Cutter", and "Laser Sweep", were cut out of the encounter after a broader play testing report showed that players were finding the experience too long, to the point of being overwhelming.

This was especially true for the arena movement mechanic, as having a failing point too close to the start of the stage was generating a ton of frustration for more casual players, and having it ruin speed runs so far into the game was not well received by the more experienced ones, which is why this along with other mechanics in the final document were removed from the final-release version.

Ultimately, these changes resulted in a tighter, more dynamically paced encounter that is still quite challenging, but with more manageable stages, significantly reducing the frustration factor while increasing its engagement.

Above: Design schematics for the arena's "multi-core" system movement patterns.

The arena being a hazard in itself as a part of the overall fight was a recurrent mechanic introduced since the boss fight of Chapter 2, and as such was quickly approved for the initial prototype, well received in initial testings and documented in detail for the core implementation of the bossfight in the respective design document and encounter flow chart.

Playthrough

Gallery