Boss Balancing

Posted on by Ian

This week I balanced all the bosses of level 3, meaning the third level is looking pretty done!

When I say “balancing” the bosses, I’m just talking about making them challenging, fair and fun for all difficulty levels. A lot of it is adjusting values like how much damage they do, how long they give you to react before they attack, or how fast they move… among many many others. There can also be a lot more to it than changing values — if I decide an attack is unfair or not fun, I’ll re-do animations, hitboxes, AI, whatever.

An old gif of Red’s fight. The smaller birds get lost behind her shots, and can come from below, giving you almost no time to see them — both examples of things I consider unfair and re-work.

I generally start by getting each boss to a point where I think it’s exciting and challenging to fight them. I’ve been playing this game for years now (also, I’m making it…) so balancing them to challenge myself usually means a pretty hard fight for other people, and these values become the settings for Hard or Very Hard.

The birds no longer swoop under the player, and now render in front of Red’s bullets! The hardest difficulty uses the hardest bird behaviour.

Then I scale it way back for Easy mode — making timing windows and damage amounts more generous, and sometimes taking out certain elements or attacks if they seem too troublesome. I honestly couldn’t say for sure what good values for Easy mode are, but I’m using the original Bleed’s bosses for reference and will supplement this with a lot of playtesting with Bleed newbies later on.

Red’s bullets warn you longer before firing, fire less often, move slower, and have a greater chance of being reflectable. The birds also move slower and obviously behave differently. Etc etc etc.

Once that’s done I’ve established the boundaries of the boss’s behaviour, and can select points somewhere in the middle for the remaining difficulties!

I’m not sure why but this is one of my favourite things to do, and I’m glad I’ve left it until this point. I can’t describe how exciting it is going through improving, refining and balancing all these bosses. I’d also like to think a certain measure of consistency will result, since I’m doing it roughly all at once.

See you next week!