Introduction

Super Devil Boss Killer is a C#-scripted Unity Project where a player faces an AI-boss. This boss takes references from Diablo 2 in both style and mechanics.  The boss should fit in at the end of a dungeon and my focus was to get a player to easy recognize the design of both the player and the boss to be able to finish and defeat the boss in 3-5 minutes.

The features of the boss includes Area of Effect attacks, attack patterns, projectiles and three different phases. The features of the player will be both melee and ranged attacks, as well as special attacks. The environment is set in a sandy Diablo 2 environment. 

Specifications

Player and Boss systems

Some own Models and Particles

Some Particles from Unity Asset store

Created in 7 workdays

Created while attending The Game Assembly

Planning and inspiration

My inspiration when planning the boss came from both Diablo 2 but also how some bullet-hell shoot em up works. I wanted the player to almost always move and to feel that the boss was getting harder and harder which was escalating into a nice crescendo in the end of the fight. 

In the planning I was also hoping to make a level with enemies from the start but when my planning was finished I settled to make a more complex boss battle and not focus too much on other enemies and level. I wanted this to be a showcase for my knowledge in C#.

How I made The Fight

The Player

Main attacks

The player had three main attacks that had 0 to 15% Mana cost. The melee attack costs no mana and works as a filler for the player to use every time the boss is close. The ranged attack has low mana cost but does lower damage, enabling the player to do damage while dodging the attacks from the boss. Finally the hard slow melee attack for when the player has more time to do melee hits, costs more mana and has a longer cast-time/animation.

Special Attacks and Movement

The player also had a special ranged attack that could be used and executed when the player had more than 50 mana. This attack drained the mana per second and shoot small projectiles in three bending cones in front of the player. This attack was supposed to be used versus small enemies if I would've had time to do levels, but I decided to keep it since it gave the "Ultimate" feeling. 

The player also had idle, walking, damage and death animations that I blended together in unity. In the picture above you can see how all the classes worked together to unite the player. 

The boss

Main features

The boss was divided into three phases where the boss did some special-attacks for every unique phase. The boss also had two main attacks that were used when the special-attacks was on cool-down, one fire ball attack and one melee attack. The boss was treated like a Shoot'Em up boss where the player had to dodge bullets to survive. 

Special Attacks

As I said before the boss had special attacks for every phase making it harder for the player each new phase the boss entered. The first phase had a Nova attack, causing damage in a sphere around the player after some seconds. The second phase had what I called Nova Barrage, shooting many low damage fireballs in each direction, it also had laser-beams going out and rotating from the centre of the platform like an X. The last phase kept the abilities from the second phase and added a cloud that slowed the player, making it even harder to dodge abilities. All phases also used a rotating storm, four circles appearing on random places damaging the player. 

Final Thoughts

This project was really fun to do, I've made mini games for unity before for 2D so this was a new challenge for me. To do a boss-fight I had do work around both game design and around my capabilities as a scripter. I feel very comfortable working with Unity and C# and I wanted to show that with this project.

Even though this I had issues mostly regarding the Animations of the characters, programming and blending animations was a new thing for me and it felt almost impossible from time to time to make it perfect It was difficult to take someone else's models from the asset store and blending the animation. The other issue was that I couldn't get my boss' walking animation to work properly so I had to make it a static boss even though he switches places, the model of the boss was not fitting for this since you can clearly see that he has good legs. If I could redo this I would use another model, because I was happy about how the fight panned out.

If I could redo this project I would focus more on the art of the fight. I was not happy with the looks of the game and camera and I would maybe redo the models and terrain to make them fit better together. I'm happy with how I got all my systems to work together and all the nice feedback I've recieved on the game design and the design of the abilities.