Dragon Environment Concept Drawings Jet pack gameplay version of dragon battle

Initially, the dragon boss battle was supposed to take place inside a warehouse. Once I prototyped the battle with an appropriately sized dragon, the warehouse didn't fit the combat design. When getting feedback from the team, everyone agreed that next-gen bosses should be larger and more animated than those of years past, so the size of the dragon continued to increase. A large flying creature needed a more open space to roam around in. I defined the gameplay space we wanted to develop with a concept artist and settled on a mystical themed series of rock formations off the shore of the city. These were the concept sketches she made.

In the process of defining the look, I wanted to test out another gameplay idea. In order to integrate jet pack gameplay and to add a heightened sense of drama into the battle, I created a ring structure where the bridges in between the platforms would be destroyed by the dragon during the battle. The rocks would then collapse, narrowing the number of places the player could stand on. In addition, the glowing tops of the platforms would light on fire when the dragon performed a special attack under the ring structure. While this idea made the battle unique, playtesting revealed that a long flying enemy was too difficult to hit with the player camera settings we had settled on. The battle and level were simplified to make the dragon a fixed target.

The Destroy All Humans! series is also recognized for spoofing pop culture in each decade. DAH!:Path of the Furon is set in the 70s. The emperor boss arena is a spoof of a very popular sci-fi movie released around that time. I created a whitebox version of this boss arena that featured a collapsing floor so that the second part of the battle could feature aerial jetpack fighting. Time and resources did not allow for jetpack play to be developed, so the battle was constrained to being on foot and the room was adjusted to reflect that.