Hey wonderful people, did I mention your shirt looks nice today? Anyway…

Previously I said that there would be no shooting and no punching, however, I never exactly meant that I wouldn’t add combat and enemies and such. But you will fight these enemies entirely by jumping on them, now that may sound pretty boring but I believe it can be done well. For example (even though they weren’t bosses) I always thought fighting hammer bros as Mario was very engaging even if there were no platforms or anything.

I figured the core idea was creating it so that the player had to make a strategic decision of when to try to jump on the enemy. Or to make it so that specific criteria must be met in order to have a chance to jump on the enemy (for example with the hammer bros you need to get on the inside of their hammer arcs before you can try to jump on them.) Thus I created this guy

A melee boss that swings his electric weapon (Trident? lance? idk) to battle you. He holds it straight up when in a neutral position, this means it is impossible to jump on him unless he swings his weapon. However he only swings at you when you get close, and due to the arc of his weapon, if he starts swinging, you can’t just jump to avoid it. This results in an interesting dynamic where the only way to damage him is to walk up to him, then move away and jump on him.

(By the way, the way this loops is very satisfying and completely accidental)

This enemy is defeated by using a simple pattern: approach, retreat, jump on its head. It’s somewhat difficult to execute but ultimately it is more about muscle memory than any sort of tactics. There is no room for strategy if it does the same thing every time. This is fine for this enemy because it is a miniboss that you only encounter once because bosses are ultimately about learning their patterns then executing the counter.

However, for actual enemies that you encounter multiple times, they need to feel different every time. This can be achieved by making the player rely on the environment to kill them. For example, an enemy that will stay at the ceiling, making it impossible to jump on. The only way to defeat it is to lure it to a place with a higher ceiling.

This enemy isn’t done and will not appear in the demo.

There are many other ways to add environmental interaction to your enemies. Make them die when they fall off a cliff, make them die when they walk into another enemy, have enemies explode when they die and those explosions will kill other enemies. Maybe create enemies that will shoot bullets but if the bullets miss the bullets can kill other enemies. The point is that just jumping on an enemy isn’t very fun, but you can make all types of enemies that force you to strategize when you jump on them and how you position yourself.

Then there are the setpiece enemies. The enemies that you don’t exactly fight but either just survive until they die or wait around for one of their weaknesses to magically pop up.

Most bosses from Rayman Legends fit this description

However, I’m not a fan of this type of combat because it doesn’t really feel like an actual fight and there is no room for player skill. What I mean by this is that the worst player and the best player will essentially fight the boss in the same way, there is no way to kill the boss faster by being better at the game.

Another, very similar, type of fight is a battle that offers “hard vulnerabilities” these are moments in the fight where the boss is invincible for most of the fight except for moments when it is extremely obvious that you should attack now.

These fights often suffer from the same problem of being too predictable and not based on the player’s actions. So that’s why most of the bosses in my game will be a different type of fight. One that doesn’t offer you hard vulnerabilities but is constantly able to be damaged it’s just very difficult to get close enough because of the boss’ attacks.

Don’t worry this guy’ll have a sprite eventually

As you see in this video there are many opportunities to jump on the enemy but they are always somewhat protected by bullets. This means that the more skill you have the more of these openings you will be able to utilize, meaning the better you are the faster you kill it.