Boss Design - Nightmare after Nightmare
- Giorgio De Medio
- May 7
- 7 min read
Updated: May 8
While working on Town of Zoz I had the opportunity to work on every boss of the game, and Nightmare Eeza was definitely my favorite. A spiteful woman that looks back on her past as a dreadful warrior, not being able to cope with her current life as an unhappy chef and a busy mother.
Oh, and I didn't design it, I wasn't even the one responsible of her first implementation, but I was all hands on her re-design once the original plan revealed itself too out of scope for the production of the project, and that in particular was a blast.
Core Themes
Town of Zoz is a narrative-oriented Action RPG, so it only comes natural that every boss is heavy in the backstory department. The core narrative themes for this boss were:
Motherhood:
Eeza is not just a mother in the game, she's the main character's mother, tormented by her past where she lost her first child. All of these links and traumas cannot be overlooked while designing her bossfight;
Greed:
She keeps money from her family, buying a lot of stuff for herself without telling others, coping with her life issues with impulsive purchases;
Gluttony:
She's hungry for multiple different things in life that she can't get, locked in an unhappy marriage and the busy life of a mother and a pub-owner, that prevents her from pursuing the things that she really wants;
Combat Expertise:
She was a fiery fighter in her youth, mixing combat skills with a barbaric instinct on the battlefield; the Nightmarish version of this character needs to waste little to no movement while fighting her son, showing that she still is war-ready if needed.
Paper Design and Round One of Iterations
The original plan was to have a bossfight with multiple HP thresholds, where attacks would change and become increasingly harsher on the player; trinkets would spawn in the arena after certain attacks, creating a break in the pace of the fight, with Nightmare Eeza entering a Rage state as the player tries to destroy these trinkets, symbol of her greed. Minions were planned to be present, her demonic babies, with the goal of pathfinding towards the walls of the arena, gathering food, that they would then transport towards a cauldron in the center, being slaves and cooks for their hungry mother, healing her HP with this action.
When it was time to commit on a moveset for this boss, most of the attacks were mostly physical, linking to her past as a fiery warrior:
a Belly Bite attack, dashing forward before striking, with a variation where she would repeat the attack a second time;
a beast-like attack where she would charge the player on all fours;
a sumo-like Stomp attack;
a Belly Groundslam, where she would jump high in the air, dynamically aiming towards the player's position, trying to crush them with her size;
two Punch attacks, to hit right in front of her, swinging from left to right and viceversa;
a Backslam, where she would punish attackers behind her by falling on her back;
a Block & Counter attack with her belly, where she would wait for the player to attack just to retaliate;
The first prototype was a bit rough, the attacks were mostly okay with a few exceptions, but the overall logic was difficult to read, with too many things happening all at once and, most importantly, the identity of the bossfight being opaque, was she a fiery fighter or just a generic big boss like in so many other games?
She needed to be terrifyingly agile for her size, a wrecking ball with a brain, the dynamic was supposed to be fought like a mental game where the player had to exploit her fragility to really get the upper hand. A Vomit attack and a Vacuum one were added, to close the distances in different ways without moving the boss like in the melee attacks, but it wasn't enough.
With the milestones hitting us one after the other, we had to momentarily move on from this bossfight, keeping the feedback from the playtest in mind (and on Miro) for when the time of tackling this task would come again.
Round Two
After almost a year from the previous iteration, I was given ownership of most of the bossfights from my lead, with the intent of trimming the fat from their designs, polishing the implementations (as well as tackling leftovers) and finding a niche for each bossfight in the design space of the game, with 10 bosses to be differentiated enough to set the pace for the game's chapters.
I started by reviewing pretty much everything we had regarding her, from the previous plans to the early inputs from the creative director. The next step was assessing the big picture: what weapons are introduced that could be leveraged? Which small enemies preceeds her? What are we building towards narratively and with each new gameplay element we're introducing? Which circles can be closed with this bossfight?
After organizing my notes and idea, I created a board with a new plan, a different organization for what we already had, trying to nail a moveset and a bossfight logic that would reveal different from anything that the player experienced up until that point. I removed some attacks, a few others were added, most of them were polished under every aspect.
The Rage State and the Minion Phase were too complex to fit well in a bossfight so important, those were heavily reworked as well. I listed every requirement for each of the elements of the bossfight, communicating with the Lead Animator and the Lead Programmer to assess those requirements based off the resources we had for that milestone, readjusting were needed. The frame data was also reworked, analyzing each animation to fit the latest guidelines from the Lead Designer, updating the documentation to reflect that and to track the work from animators, VFX and SFX.
The plan was moving forward, and the boss was starting to improve by leaps and bounds, everything was slowed down, the important moments were broken down more, to shine by themselves as much as possible. The retimings were proceeding really well and the playtesters were reacting accordingly to how refined the bossfight was looking with each passing week.
Final Round
Finally the boss started moving like the menace she was, the visual for some attacks was changed from just heavy to heavy AND fast, but also purposeful and expert.
Food Phase (Motherhood, Gluttony):
Her minions were also implemented. Since the original logic was pretty complex, me and the Lead Programmer trimmed it down, so that we could've reused the rig and attacks of a specific small enemy to build everything up, with Nightmare Eeza's minion able to move towards the cauldron, charging the throw of food for a while, before striking the center of the cauldron, healing their mother plenty. The player is supposed to stop them, and this is where I decided to leverage the potential of the Spear, a strong and fast weapon, capable of closing distance quickly with the minions, preventing Nightmare Eeza from healing and overcoming this tricky phase of the bossfight;
Vomit:
With the help of our VFX Artist, we changed the way the Vomit attack worked, spawning a poisonous pool where the attack would hit, limiting the space for the player and locking them in a more mindful positioning while fighting the boss, at least for Eeza's next 2-3 attacks;
Rage State (Greed):
Since the player collects coins by moving for pretty much the whole game, we thought that using that mechanic during the bossfight would have proven really smart to save resources up and avoiding the introduction of a new visual for the player to read in the middle of a tense battle.
As the boss performs a Ground Slam, the screen will heavily shake, as coins starts falling from the ceiling. Eeza body is engulfed in flames (AoE damage around her), her speed and damage increased, while she attacks the player with more fury and intensity than ever before. The coin number required to overcome this phase is increased with the passing of the HP thresholds, as the player starts to play on the defensive, managing stamina and positioning to collect the coins (that spawn on a delay in random coordinates of the arena, to make the player adapt on the spot and not take the positions for granted);
As soon as the last coin is collected, Nightmare Eeza will be stunned and tired from the intense back & forth trying to stop her son/the player.
Moveset and Stats Adjustments (Combat Expertise):
The physical moves had the issue of covering similar niches within her AI, so I decided to make them different enough, adjusting properties for each attack, hitbox shapes, side effects (the Stomp will also stun without damage in a larger area, setting up the next attack), frame data for the anticipations, recoveries and the windows inside the montages. During the last months of development I also worked with QA to tune her final stats, making the moments where she is vulnerable matter a lot more, to make these instances of vulnerability shine a lot more during the bossfight.
Playtests were obviously crucial to adjust parameters like Damage, HP and general Speed for the character, the goal was to have a tough boss that could outsmart you when faced in a direct way, with small clear openings to strike back and elements of suspension that would make the player change strategy on the fly in order to survive.
The original numbers were obviously too harsh on the players, but I'm pretty proud of the balance we managed to strike, especially with all the variables from the food that the players have at their disposal during the game (which required trying the bossfight with different buffs and variables before settling on the average numbers).
Conclusion
There's something from creating order in the design space of a feature that I really find envigorating for my work confidence, working on this bossfight really enforced how organization and tracking can be the best weapons of a task-slayer, especially after jumping on these implementations after they were on hiatus for a while and you weren't even the original owner of the designs and the thoughts behind certain creative choices.
Working with the team on the planning and the iterations was really fun too, there's a bit of each of us in this implementation, from the programming logic to the animation retimings, from VFX inputs to how we asked for environment adjustments to the art department in order to have the space metrics needed for the bossfight to work.
Analyzing choices before breaking down what matters and what doesn't is a tough challenge, it requires a presence and an awareness that is quite rare, that needs to be cultivated beyond your workplace, slowly becoming the seed from which every fulfilling moment in the design discipline stems from.
No one will take reaching these heights from you during the first years of your career, and these are the moments where you're reminded why you're doing what you're doing.
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