Boss Design

I paper designed, prototyped, polished, and shipped a total of 12 boss encounters (7 currently live), three of which are finale fights featuring unique mechanics, engaging narrative beats, and moments of huge spectacle In addition to these fights, I also maintained or shipped another 4 fights and had a hand in helping design others in the game.

• Broodmother S'ilreth, The Trail of Lingering Light, Ryv'n, The First, The Bloodspawn, Grand Deceiver, Dread Legion, Bloodrage of Vuul, and others not currently released.

Each boss features unique behaviors, scripted events, and multiple distinct phases that require intimate knowledge of Unreal's replication system. In addition, each boss required a proper setup of script logic to communicate between our unique procedural environment and themselves while ensuring the overall package for each boss felt challenging and exciting for players with a wide variety of playstyles.

The First

Her original design detailed the arena itself being a kind of weapon that fired lasers at players along with constellations that the players needed to keep track of to stay safe and solve mechanics in the arena. In the bottom of the floor behind glass would be constellations that players would need to use to stay safe during phase mechanics. At the midpoint of the fight, she would destroy the machine she was using to completely transform the level and escalate mechanics.

The following list are some problems I started running into after initially starting on the prototype and iterating on it:

• Too many immunity windows

• Hitting her with her own room mechanics was unclear and difficult to communicate to players

• Rotating parts of the rooms made people motion-sick

• Glass/translucent parts of the arenas were expensive

• It was strange that she would destroy a machine that she was using as a defense

After iterating we decided to completely cut the constellation mechanics in favor of the leap of faith event as inspiration for the fight mechanics. Instead of using constellations at the cardinal directions she would use the leap of faith tiles and spawn them at you from different directions while the players had to navigate most of the floor being gone.

Instead of her using the room as a defense she instead just fights the player with her own set of bullet hell mechanics that arent reliant on the arena itself, once she gets angry enough she shatters the entire level and transforms it to try and end the players once and for all.

This worked much better for several reasons:

• No more expensive translucent

• No more rotating pieces that would make the player sick in the core arena

• Removed the narrative dissonance with her hitting herself with her own defenses and destroying her own machine.

• Fewer immunity windows

In retrospect, this design was received much better and became one of the best showcase pieces in the game.

It is still lacking in some places - for example, replayability. The patterns in her attacks are all the same in the first half of the fight and because Wayfinder is a live-service product, players get tired of the cinematic moments very quickly. If I could go back - I would look at adding different variations to the bullet hell style mechanics and making the cinematic moments move faster so it has better replayability for grinding.

It also lacks a way of getting ranged players involved in the fight, very often they can remain idle and just shoot at her while other players take her aggro and aren’t challenged. Introducing other factors into the arena like sundry projectiles on her attacks that target ranged players or some kind of effect that targets them would help in getting them involved in the fight.

Post-launch we received a couple of feedback items:

• Falling off the side of a tile during the leap of faith phase was extra punishing because you would respawn in the center and immediately get hit by more tiles

  • I added in an immunity window for players after respawning in the middle to make sure this didn’t happen and felt better

• Players were lingering in the center of the leap of faith because it was the easiest way to avoid the tiles

  • I added more variance to the velocity of the tiles and increased the spawn rate of the tiles in the center of the direction that they are spawning

A lot of the scripting for each of the boss fights is extremely hands-on this included learning a couple of things:

• Replication pipelines across networked/peer-to-peer environments in unreal including rep notifies, RPCs, and GAS gameplay cues.

  • Helped in scripting the arena destruction and toggleable floor tiles in a way that wasn’t too server-intensive

• Communication pathways in Unreal from AI blueprints to levels in a procedural environment where everything is injected and dynamically generated.

  • I managed to construct best practices for transferring data decided by the AI down to the event levels which have no inbuilt pipeline for communication via event dispatchers and enums to make a custom state switch.

• How to leverage our score-based decision package to cater to Phase Abilities and highly scripted sequences that were outside of normal behavior.

• Different reset cycles in unreal in play, fail, and restart.

At various stages of development, I worked with level design to streamline the arena for her to better cater for the fight - initially, the arena had:

• An upper rim to it that players could stand on and completely avoid some projectiles

  • We solved this by adding collision around the top arena so players couldn’t jump off early or abuse the rim edges

• A leap set of tiles leading up to the fight arena which you jumped off to get to the center arena

  • Replaced this with a teleporter

• A much larger base to it with a ton more play space that left Omen feeling too small for the space with her silhouette

  • Bringing the playspace in helped her feel bigger combined with scaling her up a little, this helped her fill out the space and put more pressure on players to avoid her bullet hell attacks.

• A dome cover that players abused/got stuck on while fighting

  • Removing the dome opened up the play space and avoided a bunch of issues with players getting stuck on or abusing the dome lid

I also collaborated with World Art and VFX to finalize the arena

• Once the size and other specifics of the level were finalized, I merged the rotating rings and the arena itself so it could be shattered via VFX

• The world art pass on the wider arena happened after this and we had to iterate on the wider tile art to make sure none of it affected the rings and inner tile.