BOSS-TON TEA PARTY

SPECIFICATIONS

ROLE

Game Design Generalist

GAME ENGINE

Unreal Engine 5.3.2

TEAM

TIME FRAME

2 Weeks

DESCRIPTION

This is a prototype for a mid game boss battle with a giant tea pot.

YEAR

2024

GENRE

MMORPG

PLAYER MODES

Single-player, Multiplayer

CONCEPT

PROCESS

REFLECTION

CONCEPT

Goal

Create an MMO boss battle of mid-game difficulty with two phases and an ability the boss can use to influence the level.

CONTRIBUTION

My biggest contribution

Paper Design

Boss abilities
Battle phases
Boss attack pattern

Prototyped

Balanced

Boss attack damage, speed & duration
Boss attack pattern
Player attack damage & speed
Slingshot reload time.

Paper Prototyping

Enemy abilities

We took a lot of inspiration from Breath of the Wild for this project, so I played and watched a lot of the boss battles to take note of what type of attacks were most common and what function they might have. After having outlined their categories, I started coming up with some attacks that would fill a similar function while following the theme of our game.

Read analysis

Boss's attack pattern

We had a team meeting to talk about the suggestions I had created and with the team's feedback I scoped down our attack options based on what the player would be tested in, pacing, functionality, combination potential and gameplay enhancement. When I had a better idea of what to cut and what to keep, I sat down with a teammate to paper prototype the battle. This helped us figure out smaller details like where certain objects should spawn, for example.

Challenges

Preventing spamming with cool downs

During playtesting we noticed that the player could continuously shoot at the boss without limitations, and it caused the boss to die very quickly. Our technical designer suggested that we added a cool down for the slingshot so we did. By balancing the cool down time, the time it takes to pull the slingshot to its max and the amount of damage we could do to the boss, The experience became more challenging without feeling unfair or uncomfortable.

Preventing close combat with a wave

We also noticed that the player could get very close to the teapot resulting in attacks not being able to hit. We solved this by adding a small wave of tea to both push the player away and penalise them with a bit of damage.

REFLECTION

At the end of the project, I believe we managed to create something fun and inspiring. I feel good about the features we put into this experience, and even though it's not perfect, it is a good foundation for something that could grow and improve.

Some features I wish we had succeeded in implementing would have been the slight rotation away from the player when the weak spot is showing to increase difficulty and encourage movement while shooting.

Having more teacups and have them take up more space in the arena. There were too many dead spots where the player could just stand unscathed and shoot.

Lastly, having the teapot hover a bit above ground in phase 2 would have added more variety to the teapot, it would've felt more menacing and it would add one more challenge to the shooting.