Boss Rush

[bananaguy12]

I was wondering what people's opinions on having a boss rush in a game are. I know a lot of people dislike boss rush in games like kamilia or sz3. Is there a way to do a boss rush well?

[OhNoezEinPandy]

Bossrush comes with 2 design problems:

Time spent - You played a good fangame so far and flowed through the stages at a decent pace. You got maybe stuck at one place or two so far. Suddenly you have a room which blocks you from any other content in the game for a gigantic amount of time due to the sheer difficulty of the bosses. Getting to the K3 bossrush took people on release like 50-100 hours. Suddenly they get slapped for another 100 hours in this single room. The time ratio is just completely broken.

Bosses are a direct copy/slightly altered versions of existing bosses - some people dont want to get the first experience of a particular boss from a popular fangame in an already changed version. They want to see the original first. Thats why they stop.

Some games have a decent bossrush. I wanna be the Crysis had one which was not super time consuming and you actually had the possibility to skip out a few of them because you only needed to reach a certain treshhold of points.

[Stepcore]

Personally I feel like boss rushes should be an after-game bonus like it generally is in other games (non-fangames). I would rather have the boss, that would have been a boss rush, just be more phases with checkpoints in between.

[Denferok]

Boss rush is an inherently flawed concept and there is no real work around it. You feel like you're in the same place for an extended period of time even if you're dealing with the bosses very quickly. You're still returning to the same room and the sense of progression is significantly diminished. I personally feel the same way about "stage rushes". It's not a noticable problem until it becomes too long. Think of it this way, let's say you had a game with 10 stages and 1 boss. The game would feel a lot less rewarding if you could choose which order you'd want to do the stages, at least in my opinion.

As a person who doesn't mind the boss rushes in the kamilia series, I think having a boss rush is OK if it's optional and does not lock any content behind it.

[bananaguy12]

I was wondering because I wanted to make a boss rush in my game with three original bosses.

[Denferok]

It'll still be a flawed concept no matter how you look at it.

[tehjman1993]

"Inherently flawed concept" only applies to the standard of boss rushes that fangames are using today, such as the K3 or Z3.

Boss rush, by design, is a series of boss fights that you need to accomplish before continuing on. There are multiple ways to approach this concept, and the most popular way of approaching it is the one that is frowned upon the most.

"Traditional" Boss Rush - A series of bosses (that may/may not have a save before/after each boss) that you beat before continuing. This is what is seen in games such as K3 and Z3, and have way too high of a difficulty curve to progress at any decent rate. The difficulty of these boss rushes is typically so high, it takes the player 10-40+ hours for each boss, with some going well beyond 40 hours (see: Piano in K3). This is probably not the best way to go about boss rushes, but is the most traditional, reminiscent of the Megaman series. If you do choose this method, you need to nerf your bosses to a point where they are easy enough to beat within a short amount of time. However long it takes the player to beat the platforming should not exceed how long it takes them to beat any particular boss, more or less.

"Target Score" Boss Rush - A series of bosses that have different point values assigned to them. A door will unlock after X amount of points, allowing you to progress past the boss rush without having fought all of the bosses. This is well done in "I wanna be the Crysis", where you have to score 25 points to get past the boss rush. Harder bosses award more points, and vice-versa for easier bosses. This is a much more player-oriented way to go about boss rush, as it allows the player to pick and choose what bosses they want to fight. A major disadvantage of this style is that it typically requires a large number of bosses to pick from, which is opposite of what you had planned for your boss rush.

"Lottery-Style" Boss Rush - A series of bosses that are randomly chosen from a pool of bosses that must be fought in some order. There may be a varying number of bosses to fight, or there may be only a select X number of bosses to fight out of a pool of pre-determined bosses. For example, if I had 6 bosses, I can have the player randomly "roll" 3 of them to fight. I could also potentially give the player 1 or 2 "re-rolls" for any boss that they think is too difficult/they don't like. I like this boss rush the most, but I only see traces of this boss rush scattered throughout games, typically through platforming instead of bossing. For your game, out of 3 bosses, you could have the player roll 1 or 2, with possibly a re-roll for one of them if the player really does not like that boss. Maybe the re-roll could be a secret item in your game, or a reward.

This is how I see boss rushes. I don't believe boss rush is an "inherently flawed" concept, rather, the traditional style may not suit fangames to the liking of the majority of players. Thus, tweaks are required from the traditional boss rush to better suit fangames and the player himself/herself.

[bananaguy12]

Interesting, tj. I will think about maybe trying something like what you listed. I don't really want to add mores bosses to my game (it's a lot of work to make bosses) so the shuffling option might not fall through. Do you think it would be better to have them placed one after the other or all in one room? Maybe it would feel more like progress if you did one after the other but I'm not sure I like the idea.

[bananaguy12]

Have you thought about changing your games structure and placing those 3 original bosses somewhere else?

Yes but I don't think I want to do that.

[cenobyte321]

I really like the way Boss Rush is presented in Final Fantasy, specifically in FF4 , it's one battle after another of previous bosses with incremented stats. Several elements make the boss rush very balanced and enjoyable to go through from having to finally put down the previous foes to knowing their strategies, so fighting all of them isn't that strenuous.   

I believe the best example that comes close to this one is the Influka battle after the Four Devas, which is actually a boss rush from the previous installments.

[tehjman1993]

Interesting, tj. I will think about maybe trying something like what you listed. I don't really want to add mores bosses to my game (it's a lot of work to make bosses) so the shuffling option might not fall through. Do you think it would be better to have them placed one after the other or all in one room? Maybe it would feel more like progress if you did one after the other but I'm not sure I like the idea.

It sounds like you want to stick with the traditional style, possibly lottery-style. Honestly, I think your best course of action is one of the two options here:

1.) Traditional boss rush that is either a.) one room after another in a pre-determined order or b.) one room with many hubs.

For a.) If you choose a pre-determined order for 4 bosses, make sure these are easy enough to beat in a very reasonable time. Do not make these a grind-fest (only a very vocal minority enjoys this). Although I don't want to tell you how you should make your game, I think you should consider a "skip" item/option in the game for 1 of the bosses. Maybe an insta-kill item that the player can use only once on one of the 4 (or however many) bosses. A slight increase in difficulty for each boss would probably be best here, as well.

b.) If you choose a hub with many rooms, you could follow the above advice and use an insta-kill item on one of the portals. Again, I don't want to tell you how you should make your game according to how I think it should be made. You decide what's best for your game, however, in a hub setting, there is less of a progression feel and more of a grind feel overall. I would only use hub if you were planning on a target-score boss rush, honestly.

A good example is to take a look at Rekt - we used a lottery-style boss rush for stage 4, while using a hub-like pre-determined order boss rush for stage 5. Ultimately we ended up with a traditional boss rush stage 6, but Get Rekt literally has every piece of boss rush I talked about. Every stage feels unique to itself, rather than just copying boss fights over and over again.

Once again, this is just how I feel you should go about it. Despite stage 4's boss design flaws, I think Get Rekt's overall stage design for 4-6 was each unique in its own way, and didn't feel copied. Try those out, and see what you like best.

[Derf]

Interesting, tj. I will think about maybe trying something like what you listed. I don't really want to add mores bosses to my game (it's a lot of work to make bosses) so the shuffling option might not fall through. Do you think it would be better to have them placed one after the other or all in one room? Maybe it would feel more like progress if you did one after the other but I'm not sure I like the idea.

I liked how Kirby did it where you climb a tower and you can see the room above you as you travel emphasizing progress as each boss beats allows you to ascend to the next floor.

I would personally suggest doing it like this: You have to beat all three bosses, but you can choose the order in which you do. The gimmick here is that every time you beat a boss, the remaining boss(es) get stronger. So the last boss you fight is the hardest one. This can be done through buffing health, buffing projectile speed/frequency, locking certain attacks at lower difficulties etc. You could even play around with different colour palettes for the bosses at different levels, and increasing their sprite size etc. What this would do is it would give a sense of progression through the bosses getting tougher, add variety to different play-throughs by experimenting with different bosses being left till last, and it would allow the player to tailor the experience to their own strengths, by doing the boss they find generally the hardest first etc. This could work well if you gave the bosses individual styles etc.

[Arclooper]

Tbh drawing directly from boss rushes of other styles of games is kind of a possible trap for yourself, even if you were doing it with a game that's closer in style to fangames than FF, like megaman, which is at least a 2D platformer.

For instance, FF is a turn-based game relying merely on strategy and no execution, where you can level up your characters, while megaman is a more action-based platformer than your typical fangame, so it gives you more movement/attack options and by the boss rush you have the weapon each boss is weak against, and most importantly, in these games making one mistake doesn't mean insta-death. I at least always thought that in these style of games a boss rush was more for the purpose of giving the player a confidence-boost with "look at all these bosses I had so much trouble with before and now I'm making short work of them" before the true finale of the game. In some cases you can go the other route and make the revisited bosses actually harder than before, but that takes more careful planning, to avoid making it feel like unfair buffs with grindy learning to them, or just uncreative and repetitive.

If you want to use a style similar to this in fangames, I think it should go together with an idea like this to be enjoyable, it can't be just "fight the bosses again" with no kind of difference to it, or else it's just annoying.

For fangames though I think the best idea for boss rush is taking a bit from each boss and remixing them into one fight, without making it longer than a boss fight normally should be, like having an actual boss that summons previous bosses you fought to borrow their attacks, maybe tweaking the attacks a bit, but it's not them that you're fighting, although other ways to do it can be good too, if you take care to not make them a huge roadblock for the player and not just a repeat of already beaten-bosses.

[bananaguy12]

I will probably just go with three bosses in one room like traditional boss rushes in fangames. All these replies really are awesome though. I guess I'm just too attached to the plan I already have for my game.  :3

[Denferok]

The fact that you are planning and have a vision for your game is fantastic. Follow your vision and make sure the game is fun for you to play. If you like it, other people are bound to like it as well. Don't try to cater to all types of players.

If you think your boss rush is fun, fitting and an important part of the game - by all means, go for it!