INTERESTING BOSS BATTLES

Not sure how to spice up your bosses? Here's some ideas.

Introduction
Hello, and this is my third tutorial . In this tutorial we will be discussing how to make bosses more interesting. In my games I always strive to make bosses, and normal enemy battles quite fun and interesting for the player. A lot of this experience comes from playing games like Final Fantasy X and World of Warcraft where the boss battles always had interesting factors to them. I will discuss some of these as well as on death sequences.

Kind of boss battles you should avoid vast quantities of:
Tank bosses, while these are good in a small variety, its not very fun when every second boss takes a good ten minutes to kill, I'd limit these to 2 a game depending on length.
Death Sentence battles: these are good in a small quantity. It makes the player think about his actions instead of just spamming attack. But when every second or third boss is a death sentence battle, it becomes irritating.

How to make on death events
If any of you have played final fantasy and have gotten to an on on death spell cast mob , you will know what I am talking about.

How we do this in VX is simple, but rather out of most peoples mind sets. As not a lot of people use the immortal quality that you can set on the troops in the database.

To do this, you will have to right click an enemy in the troops area and select immortal. then have an enemy page with a condition of HP at 0%, then in the event. do a force action of the skill you want and after that do an event command of inflict enemy state>death. that is all, that is all you need to do, this works for both tankentai and normal, as I have tested it in both. You need no scripts to do this. Just remember to set immortal, this is why we need to inflict enemy death through events. because unless that happens, he wont die. and will remain on 0 HP.

Boss battle examples
To avoid spoiling all the boss battles in my game, I will give you a few examples, and you can think on from there.

Healer/Caster combo:
This is like Zorn and Thorn in Final Fantasy IX, one would do damaging offensive spells while the other would heal, the idea was to kill the healer first, because if you didn't, they would cast life on the other one.

What you would do is have a Caster at 0% Condition and in the event page have Healer cast life on index X, X being the index of the Caster. You would also have the healer cast heal on said index at 20% or so, you could have this as span turn or span battle, depending if you want to have the Caster healed once or every time she falls below 20% or so.

I would also suggest as well as casting offensive spells, the caster would cast protective spells on the healer, not only does this add a bit of realism, but it make it a little more challenging for the player who is now hitting for half the damage.

Suicide Bombing Monsters:
Noting the On Death events I posted above, this is pretty much the same. Except with a battle system like Tankentai they can use Use auto-life at 50% or so, and when they hit 20% they could use detonate, doing massive damage to players and destroying itself in the process, but if they used auto-life, they would rise again, with players brutally damaged, it makes the moment of which they revived very intense for the player as they have to heal their allies and deal with the bomber from whichever % of health he healed too. If you dont use tankentai auto-life, there is a way to do this with events, that you can do with tankentai and isn't so buggy.

First, you'll need a "false" auto-life ability if you don't use Tankentai, if you do, you will have to remove it if you want to event it because honestly it makes it very buggy and if you do it the way I suggest you'll have two bombers on top of each other. Since this is rather hard to explain Ill use screenshots instead.



For the transparent Kobold, you have to right click and select appear halfway, they should also be on the same spot, just did that to show you how it all works.

I am using tankentai as you can probably see, but I still prefer to do it with events because auto-life is rather buggy. sometimes it'll work, sometimes it wont. And dispelling auto-life will make it say the things but not resurrect them, when combined with a special victory scene, this looks quite awkward.



I had to cut some lines out so I could fit it on one page. That's basically the formula though.

Reflect centric monsters
For those of you who use Tankentai, the reflect system makes a battle very fun and Interesting, what we are going to do is have an enemy cast a spell which does an insane amount of damage, and the only way to avoid being hit by it and one of your party members instantly dieing is to use Repel or Reflect to bounce it back. We also want to warn the player to use the repel/reflect spell before it happens. so make the warning event.

End of Turn>Turn no 2:


Show text:
\>\c[6]\n[x]\c[0]\< [You don''t have to do this, this is just what I do.
\n[x], you need to cast reflect on yourself[or \n[x]. Try to make these message differ so its not all the same.

Change X to the Actor speaking , and the First x of the second line is the person who can cast reflect\repel and the second x is who to cast it on as he will and should be the target of the powerful spell. Then, in the next page:

End of Turn>Turn No 3:


Force Action: [X.Enemy name], [Skill name], Index X


And thats it, select the enemy which will do the skill and match the x's to the index of the monster and the Index of which player he is casting it on respectively.

I use Repel and reflect as the names for physical reflection Magical Reflection.

For those who don't know Reflection in games is usually referring to bouncing back spells, if anyone has played FFX, you'll know what I'm talking about, and anyone who has tried out the features in tankentai will also know what I'm talking about. You'll also want to make sure the spell kills the player, but if bounced back doesn't do SO much damage that the enemies end up dying too fast, but fast enough that it doesn't feel like a tank battle.

and now for the last example.

Multi-part boss battle:

If any of you have watched or played Final Fantasy VII and fought with Bizarro Sephiroth, you will know what I'm talking about.

These are battles where bosses have multiple parts that you have to destroy to make his core destructible: this is a little tricky to do and people who use tankentai will have to use a special action sequence to prevent the parts from moving when attacking.

For non-tankentai, Assemble the parts in the troops scene, of course you'll have to make different enemies in the database for each part. I would suggest using a different name for each part, even if going to as little effort to put part A part B etc.

Once assorted the core should be immortal and you should make an invulnerability state, to do this you'll need a script which makes enemies completely immune, this is difficult to do without tankentai. The Reason we want to make them immune is that we don't want player getting them to 0 hp, and have them not die, then when all the parts are dead they die instantly or will live forever, if you don't have immortal checked.

Once you have taken care of that, you'll need to make an event like this.

When end of Turn: Span Turn.

If Part A is state inflicted: [001: Death]

If Part B is state inflicted: [001: Death]
If Part C is state inflicted: [001: Death]
If Part D is state inflicted: [001: Death]
Show text
Well done, mortals!
Show Battle Animation: [1. Core] [Animation]
Wait: 40 Frame(s)
Show Battle Animation: [1. Core] [Animation]
Change Enemy State: [Core], - [Invulnerability]
Show text:
Who removed my Barrier?
Show text:
I did!
Show text:
A Possible challenge, Excellent...


That's basically it, the show text and animations are optional, they just spice it up.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and hope to see more interesting boss battles. Happy RPG Making.

Posts

Pages: 1
I thought this was going to be some game theory about what makes a good boss. Oh well.
author=Pokemaniac
I thought this was going to be some game theory about what makes a good boss. Oh well.


To be honest I thought of the same thing hahah
BizarreMonkey
I'll never change. "Me" is better than your opinion, dummy!
1625
Na, it's just a few examples that may help people design interesting boss battles.

Should I rename it?
Maybe "How to Create Boss AI" would be a bit more specific but the article is already specified as a RMVX article. Labelling it "Interesting Bosses in RMVX" would just be including redundant information.
author=GreatRedSpirit
Maybe "How to Create Boss AI" would be a bit more specific but the article is already specified as a RMVX article. Labelling it "Interesting Bosses in RMVX" would just be including redundant information.
author=GreatRedSpirit
Maybe "How to Create Boss AI" would be a bit more specific but the article is already specified as a RMVX article. Labelling it "Interesting Bosses in RMVX" would just be including redundant information.


This can be done with XP, the 2K series, and possibly RM95. You can perfectly copy intresting VX Boss making techniques with XP, and I'm sure the 2K series can perfectly copy this as well.
BizarreMonkey
I'll never change. "Me" is better than your opinion, dummy!
1625
author=thepurplearchmage
author=GreatRedSpirit
Maybe "How to Create Boss AI" would be a bit more specific but the article is already specified as a RMVX article. Labelling it "Interesting Bosses in RMVX" would just be including redundant information.
This can be done with XP, the 2K series, and possibly RM95. You can perfectly copy intresting VX Boss making techniques with XP, and I'm sure the 2K series can perfectly copy this as well.


Well, yes, I'd imagine so, it was untested at the time, but generally eventing systems are backwards compatible if you feel like doing it. Granted, the reflect centric bosses may not work in XP, as I'm not sure there is a Tankentai for it, but it can likely be done with a script.

I have very little knowledge of rm2k and 2k3, from what I have played around with it though there are many eventing options and making a reflect skill may be very easy, and you can already event auto-life. The amount of eventing commands and different options are to make up for the lack of a script editor. Which is the only reason (asides from 16 bit graphics) I haven't indulged in rpgmaker 2k or 2k3, after using vx and seeing the amount of incomprehensible bullshit scripting can pull off it makes it look rather diminuitive in the stuff it can do, not to mention the small font size makes it hard to read anything, anyway. I'd imagine most things here would be doable in all the aforementioned rpg maker systems could be done.

It might be possible to make a special client for rm2k and/or 2k3 that would allow for scripting, but having to make something that should have been there from the beginning seems a little silly, but I don't know the true power of rm2k or 2k3 so I can't say for sure when its an rpg maker I have only made a few maps and changed a few database entries in.
Pages: 1