This week I have finally implemented the AI for all our three bosses, and tried to balance them somewhat. I will explain some of the balancing in this post, for the bosses’ different AI take a look at my previous post from last week.
I started with our boss Grubby McGrub (the whack-a-mole boss). When he shoots up from the ground he will shoot some slime at you. I started with one, aimed at the player, and then added four more shooting out from him in the directions of a + and an x:
After some testing from Ludde in my group he complained about how easy it was to avoid the slime, so I added 24 more!
Now it’s very much harder to avoid the slime, especially since he shoots up from the ground almost right beneath you. You only have a very short time to move from where he comes up from the ground, the only thing alarming you is the cracks in the ground. This I also had to balance some since first I set it too low, you didn’t have a chance to get out of the way. Now you can barely make it. I still have to balance his life and damage but that will happen sometime next week. Then I have to try all the set bonuses and without any textiles at all to find out how much is the right amount.
Then I started with the boss Ben Bugger (the kiting boss). The things I have balanced with his fight is how often he shoots his slime, how slow/fast the player and the boss will run while in the goo and while not in it.
At first I managed to forget to reset the timer that decided when to increase the boss’ movement speed so he got a really high speed almost directly as the fight began so the player was unable to run away from him. This I discovered pretty fast and also changed the timer to a shorter time since we want him to be really fast and annoying. He won’t be super-fast though since when he is in the goo or he hits the player his speed reset. I believe he is still a bit too fast, since the player has 500 in speed and the boss starts with 400.
As with Grubby I still have to balance the health and damage for Ben, but it’s the same problem – I have to test all the possible combinations of textile.
The last and final boss I haven’t balanced that much yet, it’s not that much to balance since he won’t do any damage himself, and all his minions are already quite balanced. The timer for when he spawns his minions is quite long, but the thought is that he spawns them when he reaches 75%, 50% and 25% of his life as well. It’s his health I have to balance later.
Malin Lundqvist 
March 7th, 2014 at 7:08 am
Nu när jag har testat spelet är det lättare att förstå hur det kommer att upplevas det du skriver om. Men ganom att veta detta kommer det också bli lättare att klara spelet :-).
March 11th, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Hello!
Interesting post! I love reading about balance and the thought that goes into the design of any encounter.
Although, I didn’t quite understand ” I started with one, aimed at the player, and then added four more shooting out from him in the directions of a + and an x:” – I’d love for you to expand on that (as in, explaining the actual method of iteration when balancing).
I think it’s great that you added picture to reinforce your points and to demonstrate the actual difference the balancing measure you made, makes. If you’ve got access to a Nvidia Card or perhaps even Fraps, I’d love to see some videos that shows off the difference (although, this is just because I find this subject bizarrely interesting, it might just be a huge waste of time).
While writing the blog, I’d recommend trying to break up the different bosses into sub-categories in the text, so that It’s easier to understand what the boss does, what you did to the boss, and what the result was.
Other then that, this post has been great (and quite refreshing, actual in-game issues and balancing issues in general are not something that is often discussed on these blogs).
Good luck on your project, and take care!
March 11th, 2014 at 4:42 pm
Oh, I’d also like to add this article that might be of help!
http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/designing-a-boss-fight-lessons-learned-from-modern-games–gamedev-2373