Should bosses have more obvious changes in behavior?

[Professor Paul1290]

Something I noticed about a lot of the bosses after a while was that at lot of them seemed to have a very constant pattern or behavior going all the time.  A few of them(like the dragons when they get up and fly) already have different ways to move, but a lot of them are rather "single-speed".

Something I noticed from a lot of other platfomers is that bosses tend to have at least two different "modes" that they switch between (like throwing things at you vs. trying to jump on top of you). It's common enough in other platformers that not having it as much in this game feels a bit off. I think adding at least one other behavior to the existing bosses and having them switch every once in while to break up their usual pattern might add a lot to them and make them feel more like "bosses".

Maybe the Giant Amoebas could charge towards and attempt to ram the player every once in a while to break up their usual shooting. Maybe Giant Skelebots could crouch down (do they have that animation?), stand still, and fire projectiles more rapidly for a few moments. Maybe Shadow Bats can occasionally "boost" towards the player in a straight line at the player but can't change direction while doing so, forcing the player to dodge them to dodge before doing back to their usual chase.
You probably get the idea. It would be some kind of behavior that alternates with the one they have now to make them more different from ordinary trash mobs.


I figured it would probably be better to make a thread about this first since I'm not sure if something like this would be worthwhile right now. It might be a better use of time to make more bosses rather than enhance the existing ones.

[x4000]

Funny your example about the giant amoebas occasionally trying to ram you -- they already do that.  However, it's not accompanied with a shift in speed, so it may be hard to tell.

Generally speaking having multiple boss behaviors is something we want to explore, and we already have the framework in place for it as a generalized concept, so it's not terribly hard in most cases as long as we have logic that fits within that framework (which includes attack types, move speed, damage dealt, changing forms if need be, gating by tier if need be, etc).

[Professor Paul1290]

Making the change in behavior very visible might be key to this, as I get the impression that the effect in other games is rather psychological.

A lot of boss behaviors in other platforming games don't really make a lot of sense tactically. They often change behavior after a certain amount of time or damage regardless of what the player is doing, which gives me the impression that the effect is more about distinguishing the boss from the usual one-trick trash mobs and forcing a change of pace.

[x4000]

Yep, and we do the same thing with the more advanced bosses.  But for most of the simpler bosses we honestly wanted them to be more one-trick.