Kimball Brooksby - Technical Designer

Boss - The Commander

As a team, we really wanted an encounter that would showcase all the our game had to offer and allow the player to exercise all the skills they had developed during their playtime. What we landed on was the Commander.

Narrative Payoff - Throughout development, we had this picture of a freshly woken vampire, ready to slake his thirst on whatever unfortunate thing passed into his realm, so the boss was to provide a foil for that character. The Commander represents the forces of the light, encroaching on your territory of endless night, and was someone the player can feel badass about defeating.
Mastery & Expression - The experience up until the boss was mostly spent teaching the player the basics and giving them some room to try out their new "wings". It was all the more important, then, that the boss have moments that deliver strongly on both the player's desire for Mastery and Self Expression.

With Parker, another designer on my team, I mapped out the emotional journey we wanted to take the player on through this encounter, and outlined what we would need to accomplish that journey.
I then listed all the skills and abilities in our character's kit, and working back from there, designed six attacks that together fully covered over the whole set. This gave the Commander a base kit of three martial attacks and three magical attacks that were unlocked one at a time through each of his four phases.
Using these as a base, I created a state machine to manage the Commander's state changes, a base character and controller to consolidate the operating logic, and a behavior tree to dictate how the boss was to engage and respond to the player's actions.

When I started building the Commander's behavior tree, I split it up into multiple subtrees, one for each phase, thinking that this would give me more control over the boss's interaction. And, while it did to an extent, I didn't take the time to fully consider the behaviors shared between all the phases, leading to a lot of duplicated work and an eventual consolidation of the trees into the master tree for efficiency's sake.
While building out the phase changes, my team and I felt that the transitions lacked excitement and clarity, so after brainstorming for a while, we added a fake death, a short delay, then a refilling health bar between phase 2 and 3, similar to the Ape Guardian from Sekiro, to give more gravitas to the switch. This small change completely changed the feel of the fight and ratched up the tension of the second half, after the fakeout, since the player was now facing a being much more powerful than they first thought.

BossFlowChart.pdf

Boss Fight Outline & Flowchart

Boss Fight Playthrough

TotalBossFight_04-21-26.mp4

Boss Fight Playthrough

The impetus for this project was to study and explore how different factors affect the game feel of combat games. As the main way the player interacts with the game, the player was our focal point for crafting our game's feel.

Seamless Control - Central to the game feel was making the controller disappear in the hands of the player through both the actions the player's character could take and the actual buttons the player could press.
Opportunities for Mastery - Another core aspect of the game feel we were trying to craft was offering up a set of moves with enough depth to take the player on a meaningful journey of mastery and discovery as they experimented with the abilities of the character.
Power Fantasy - Parallel to providing opportunities for mastery was seeding in opportunities for the player to express power over their foes in a manner of their choosing.

To start, I got my team together to discuss our inspirations and where we wanted our game to land in relation to them. Our axis for comparison were combat assistance and number of enemies, since these were the two axis we found most combat games shared and directly influenced their difficulty.
Alongside this discussion, we sampled some of our favorite mechanics from different games to consider for inclusion in our core combat system, such as Lock On, Executions, Juggling, and Parrying.
From these two discussions, I outlined our player's basic actions, including:
- 4-hit light and heavy attack chains, ending in powerful finishers.
- A universal dodge attack that initiates a new attack chain.
- A chargeable secondary attack opener that knocks enemies down.
- Dodge-canceling from any non-dodge, non-finisher attack.
- A single-target, long-duration disabling special ability.
- An AoE knockback special ability.

As this project was solely focused on combat, I neglected to consider how slow our game would feel without standard movement options, such as sprinting or jumping. As even a game such as this needed to get players from one encounter to another quickly, these features were sorely missed by players.
As we were playtesting, I kept hearing two pieces of feedback: players were frustrated by not being able to heavy attack out of dodge, and players loved the chargeable heavy. To lean into this, I made the dodge attack a light attack specific input, and added the ability to charge any secondary attack. This increase in flexibility and realignment with player expectations drastically improved the cohesion of our move set and the flow of the combat loop, and reminded me of why early and frequent playtesting is key to rapid iteration.

Character Kit Brainstorming

PlayerActions_EarlyBrainstorming.pdf

Character Kit Early Outline

ForwardFacing_03-31-26.mp4

Character Kit In-Game

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