How To Fail At Boss Fights 

When doing a doppelganger boss fight, make sure they not only use the weapons and moves the player has, but also the overpowered DLC/Donator weapons too, just to show that your evil self resorts to pay-to-win

And obviously, when the boss is defeated, they become a playable character! Except without the cool movesets and the same health

remember folks: a harder difficulty should increase the boss damage by about x2 and the boss health by x10, with no other modifications made to the fight at all

that moment when you beat a boss into the dirt during the fight but then during the cutscene you get absolutely ran over buy the boss

The best boss fights are those that are so tilted against you that you don't know whether or not you're scripted to lose it

Bosses can be some of the most memorable moment in a game, so you should reuse them as much as possible to make sure there is no way your player can forget about your boss.

don't forget about the 5 minute walk from the bonfire to the actual fight

Also, remember to give your boss a bunch of attacks that all look nearly identical, but have to be avoided or countered in completely different ways. That way, you can simply say "skill issue".

You forgot the part where you spend all the budget on one singular attack, that both destroys the player, and their computer.

Genuine tip: Consider adding a boss rush mode, if you think it can work in your game. That will allow you to re-use existing content in an interesting way.

I love how the first piece of advice is immediately contradicted by the instructions to keep adding more phases and mechanics, instead of just being a stronger version of a normal enemy

It’s a bad boss fight when your fighting the urge to stop playing the game more than your fighting the boss

Make the boss summons waves of minions to attack players so they won’t do any damage to the actual boss!

A few additional points: - Don't telegraph attacks, have them come out of nowhere. Those are especially popular among no-hitters - Don't have the boss shoot projectiles, have him spawn them at random places on the arena. Don't worry about stupid stuff like the player's position though. Everyone loves telefrags - For flying bosses let them just fly off screen where you can not see or attack him, but HE sure can - Have a phase where the boss just spawns minions while he becomes invincible. That won't feel like filler - Give the boss a move that messes with your controls. The most classic one is completely inverting them. Have him be able to do this without warning from any place on screen so you can just run into whatever who cares bullshit - Have insta kill traps peppered throughout the arena. It's the best test of your skills if you're not even dying to the boss. Works best with the last point and KNOCKBACK MY BELOVED - Ah, yes, knockback. Have the boss just knock you around. Give him combos that can just ragdoll you across the arena, so long they just feel like an insta-kill

And before the fight, make sure to add incredibly precise obstacles that don't kill the player, but weaken them a bit before the fight. If/when the player becomes impatient from dying several times, they will get more hurt on these obstacles and probably die again in the fight, to teach your player that patience is a virtue or something.

Before I even watch the video: 1 - Make them just a common soldier (maybe retextured at most) who can inexplicably take x100 times more damage. Bullet sponges are fun! 2 - Make sure the place you fight them in isn't designed around their moveset whatsoever. Or if you do point 1, make it a really big interesting arena you don't use because it's just a common mook with a health bar! 3 - Have your NPCs throughout the game hype the boss up as some legendary, powerful killer who's very name carries an air of danger and destruction, but they get absolutely bodied by the high-level player with their end-game gear and abundance of consumables! Level-scaling is for chumps! 4 - Have absolutely no buildup to the boss fight, just let the player sorta stumble into their arena and get a healthbar and wonder what's going on! 5 - Or, buildup the boss fight WAY too much with a super-long cutscene and dramatic music, maybe even a dialogue tree before the battle; this is especially good for failure if you follow point 3! 6 - Have either way too few bosses to the point where they feel out of place in your game's design and tacked-on last minute, or way too many to the point where they lose any impact as a special, dangerous encounter! 7 - Completely forget your game has a mechanic that can instakill enemies when meleeing them from behind, and forget to provide the boss with any special immunity to this attack, allowing them to be unceremoniously dropped in an instant! Again, especially great for failure when combined with point 3!

Dont forget to give the player a reward when they defeat the boss, but not to much, they dont want to feel like it was worth it. Give them about less than one percent of the gold they spent for all the items they used, about 25% of a level up for a mid game player, and some items you got about 50 hours ago!

and don't forget the part about the music looping over and over and over and over and over and over until the player gets sick of it!

Make sure to include the part where the boss inexplicably regenerates its health and thereby removes all the work done by the player in the first place!

Also remember that the amount of time that the player is fighting the boss is a very important divergence from regular gameplay. Whereas almost every other enemy in your game will die within several seconds of the player attacking them, the boss fight will last several minutes at minimum. Therefore, you need to deliberately ensure that every boss is completely immune to all status effects, especially any that deal a moderate amount of damage over a long period of time. Otherwise, you run the risk of giving your player meaningful build choices and strategic tradeoffs, and therefore feel smugly superior for "outsmarting" you. Instead, the player is only allowed to use those skills on enemies that die in two hits anyway, as well as a handful of minibosses(because you forgot to change the status-immunity parameters when you copy-pasted a lategame enemy).

My favourite boss fight mechanic is when you defeat the boss, but then they're okay in the immediate following cutscene and they either knock you out or run away, undefeated. Making your fight with them utterly a waste of time.

destroyer, prime, and twins really took that personally

A common mistake is that when a boss fight is too easy, the developers will just make the boss have extra health. I wouldn't recommend turning the boss into a damage sponge unless you do one thing: Give the boss fight some more damaging but either more complicated or more risky strategies. Speedrunners and advanced players will love to show off how they used a difficult technique to speed through a boss fight. Having a high skill ceiling also makes it more acceptable to reuse the fight. Each time they replay the fight, the better they will get and feel. I'd recommend considering adding a reward for players who beat a boss fight with risky but quick strategies aswell.

I will put a boss in a Tic Tac Toe game. It will be legendary

Make the boss do a long attack combo and when it’s done let’s the players attack bac- but wait! the combo hasn’t finished, that long pause was just the boss charging up for the final heavy ground smash to end the combo! (it is one hit)

3 phases are absolutely lame. Have a boss with 100 phases! And (shoutout to Sonic Chaos for this one…) right once his health is depleted, his final desperation attack is an instakill with an extremely small, specific window to dodge/counter, wasting away numerous attempts in the blink of an eye as the player desperately tries to figure out how the hell you’re supposed to avoid this single attack Actually, random cheap instakill attacks that come out of nowhere is just plain great in general. Also great is a boss that will literally will not let you hurt him unless you spam a specific cheap attack of your own that, out of all the moves, he *doesn’t* ignore with some vague blocking animation

Even better if you add a timed underwater escort mission that you have to do before you even get another chance at the boss...

"hey tetris, where's the boss?" The gliched colors, the 810 line level and the crash triggers:

The boss should always be a surprise that comes out of nowhere but is also your rival in disguise. This way, every boss will be amply foreshadowed but also a surprising twist!

This seems like a personal attack on Dark Souls

I once made a flappy bird clone but with multiplayer in scratch just because y know, and imagine the confusion my friends faced when trying to beat their record and they saw a big orange bird shooting fireballs, missiles and lasers at them, invonurable for like 8 minutes until there was just an X that killed the bird in one shot just for it to not give any points, just an obstacle. Gotta love my past self, i really thought it was a fine obstacle

I loved the final boss in "Wizard of Legend" since the boss actually felt like they fought with the same rules as the player

Remember you have to prioritize a wide variety in the boss moveset to make it unique. I mean it doesn't really matter if it is fun to fight the boss because learning a boss's moveset is what becomes fun for the player!

I feel like these are getting more unhinged every video

No no no, you need to LEAD the boss over to the rock they have to trip over which will be completely randomly generated! Nothing is more fun than slowly leading a boss over to a tiny hitbox!

I think this is why I enjoy Fromsoft bossfights. The boss' moves are so intricate and varied that it feels like you're dueling for hours on end, when in actuality the longest ones are about 5 minutes.

When you reuse the boss later as a normal enemy, make sure it's clearly communicated that it's been heavily dumbed down, otherwise the player could feel some sort of progression.

After being like 12 bosses deep into my game, this video finally made me realize what I was doing wrong. Thank you, now I will just reuse the first one and delete the other 11!

Damn, im here early. Arrived before the boss even spawned

Rain world : game clearly focused on survival and exploration rather than gaining any progression from killing ennemies, yet had 1 sudo bossfight and a secret bossfight

Make sure to put a damage sponge at the end of an already bloated and tedious section.

Also if you do the bigger enemy approach, never take a cue from the absolute king Yoshi’s Island and give the enemy a creative twist on how you defeat them. Make them the same exact fight with more hits.

big empty room actually a good advice...

TBF, the boss becoming a regular enemy, later on, can serve a purpose. It now means the player has become so powerful that these guy are now on par of regular enemies, which is empowering. Remember when you struggled against LV 1 Slimes? Now you're able to take out mini-bosses with ease. Also it can be used as esculating tension for a final dungeon or something. Remember that one boss Dungeon 3? Now they are standard enemies - good luck... You'll need it.

this took really long for such a common feature in games

Make sure that none of the boss's attacks are telegraphed. Players should be able to figure out when the boss will attack based on vibes alone.

This video is about Destiny 2 and it’s exiting design that boils down to “It’s the normal enemy but with a nonsense name and it’s bigger and has an invincible shield and you might forget that you were fighting a boss because the music is the same”

2:22 In his defense, he used the Fizzle-out-your-brain-for-day-2-of-the-gamejam-beam attack

Also remember to have bosses that you cant beat, and do it as many times as possible. A forced loss may signify to the player that there are stronger enemies than you, and that you have a long way to go. This can motivate players to stick around to finally get their revenge. So doing it with every other boss fight will make it like, double encouraging right? Totally doesn't desensitize the player to boss fight since there are so few you can actually defeat. (YIIK)

As someone who recently added a boss fight to my text-based game, I 100% support this message

Another tip: don't add health bars to bosses. This is necessary for two reasons: 1) You can continue to be lazy 2) The health bar makes the boss fight easier because players will be able to understand how many hits to hit the boss. Instead, you need to find out it by spending hours and asking yourself if the boss can even die

This video is just plot twist after plot twist that I didn't see coming. I love it.

Bosses only need three attacks: Shooting a projectile directly at you, dashing at you, and shooting a circle of projectiles in every direction, most of which will go nowhere near the player. Anything else is boring. Alternatively, have the boss fire as many projectiles in as many directions as you can. This will make the boss really fun, because there's so many bullets to have fun with. And you should add knockback to those bullets too, to keep the fun going until the player dies every time they get hit by one.

Kojima and Miyazaki use this video as a tutorial on a daily basis

Gotta love bosses! Especially in puzzle games that have had no enemies at all so far, but still decide to add a stupid boss fight with a billion phases that kicks you out of the level if you get hit just once!

You know its good when you beat the boss character fairly easily, and it then shifts to a cutscene where the main protagonist is then somehow defeated anyways because the enemy is "too strong!!!"

Don't forget to make it so that when you finally beat the boss, he gives you a curse that removes your ability to jump for the REST OF THE GAME! Then right afterward he regains full health and now you gotta beat him AGAIN but this time you can't jump.

Also: you have to make sure the enviroment matches the boss fight, so make sure it has lots of traps so the player won't even be able to look at the boss' attacks

Also make sure to make the boss have 2 separate attacks that have the same wind up animation. except if you predict the wrong attack you get hit for a billion damage

4:04 PUZZLE QUEST... EXISTS!! ... And that Yoshi puzzle one...

Most importantly, remember, you're the biggest boss here

Make sure that the last hit you get on the boss doesn't kill it, but starts a cutscene where you get to watch the player character kill the boss with absolutely no input from you. Remember: moments are always more impactful if the player is forced to just passively watch them play out!

Personally I'm really excited for the episode about Stealth Mechanics or Sneaking games. It's such an incredibly easy mechanic to make brokenly optimal, or a blatant afterthought. It's also really 'fun' to put a bad stealth section in a game that has nothing to do with sneaking.

that intro is perfect, if you dont try you'll never fail so you try to be able to fail which leads in to the rest of the video

“Just add the boss as a normal enemy!” sounded like a direct attack on Miitopia and Psychonauts (the second one)

I'm grateful that the "invencible until it does a stupid thing that makes it completely vulnerable" type of boss have kinda of died in the ps3 era. There are still some of those today but they are rare

sounds like a guide made by someone who has never fought a boss, I love it

At the end of the boss fight, make sure you play a cutscene where the boss wins the fight anyway and lets you go. This makes it so you can reuse the boss in a later level, and makes the player really appreciate how powerful this boss is narratively. Players really appreciate knowing that nothing they do in the game actually changes the story.

More tips: Always have the attack variety of a boss to be the opposite of of their health pool. Only one attack when it takes 10+ minutes to defeat, tons of different attacks when it can be defeated way before it has a chance to show them all. Make all the bosses bosses cheesable and make the cheese strategy as boring as possible. Bonus points of cheese is the only viable way to defeat the boss. If making an RPG boss, always make them immune to status effects instead of having to use them strategically. If all else fails, you can just make a boss that only consisting of quicktime events. Or the boss getting defeated entirely within a cutscene.

the final form of the spider boss in deadapace 3....

1:05 Sonic Superstars, is that you?👀

I love these tutorials , i finally know how to make boss fight

"Lady Friede...my flail...bring me my flail..." Actually, I'd say the Friede fight from DS3 is one of the few instances where a triple-phase boss was truly effective. There's a lot of character and storytelling in it, with the sparse dialogue and contrast between the two enemies- the fact that one is covering his eyes in the first fight and only joins the fray when he sees the bloodstain and gets enraged. The invisibility power is also an interesting challenge (and ties back to another "frosty" boss in DS1). Then you get two very different kinds of enemies to fight at the same time, a nice contrast between big and small, slow and fast, fire and ice which is visually interesting (and also calls back to the pilgrim's prayer when you entered the level- "Fire for Ariandel...") Then the game pulls the rug out from under you by giving you a few seconds where you think you've won, and then hitting you with a much faster and more powerful version of the very first enemy, which is important because it's already taught you the basics of her attack pattern so you have a chance against her- plus an expanded battlefield from the much more destructive enemy last phase so you have more room to deal with her (again, tying the physical space of the boss room with a bit of storytelling). There's been no other boss in the game (before or after) that has three forms, so it's such an incredible moment of victory to sudden panic that despite the amount of rage and frustration that it took to to finally defeat her, I can't help but value that battle for the memory of that experience and the tying together of so many plot threads within the battle itself.

your arena should probably have some cover in it so players can hide while they're waiting for the boss's invulnerability to wear off, this will make players feel clever for using the terrain to their advantage and it won't get boring the hundredth time they have to do it

In ds3, there's an optional boss that redoes the first boss who gets completely changed halfway through the fight, but in this version, the first phase is given a cocktail of adrenaline and crack that lasts the whole fight It's such a simple concept and is basically the "fight a harder version of the same enemy" concept but something about it just makes my designer brain go brrrrr

The big empty room thing hits hard with enter the gungeon, there are 5 unique boss rooms and they are all variants of the bird with a minigun fight.

Ok so I know this video is satire, but reusing a boss (or a miniboss) as a normal enemy later in the game not only is a great way to save on development time but also helps show players how much stronger/more skilled they are. A game that does that excellently is Ultrakill, which introduces a lot of its heavier hitting enemies as minibosses complete with health bars. Even the prologue bosses, the Cerberi, become a reoccurring enemy type

I like using this series to look at games that I consider good even though they do these things. It's interesting to see times where exceptions can be made, or to see a flaw in something I hadn't noticed before.

Been watching for a couple years, some bad (good) advice XD

If you want some good examples of bosses that take a long time to beat and have tons of phases, Furi is my recommendation. The bosses do take awhile and have lots of phases, but it’s done well. Every phase builds upon the last in a challenging and interesting way, making it an elegant escalating dance of blows.

1:41 1:57 We can’t have the boss add in new attacks, or ramp up in difficulty naturally as the fight goes on. Just make the additional projectiles faster versions of the already existing ones with even more unfair hitboxes

DKC1 Really takes inspiration from that first tip

I was unlucky enough to play Minecraft dungeons with a sibling and the final boss went from doing like barely any damage to one hit killing in the matter of one cutscene.

One pet peeve I have with bosses is when they sprinkle in some regular enemies into the arena, as to just to pad it out. Like sprinkling jelly beans onto a piece of cake. It kind of dillutes the threat & EPICNESS. Think of Sif against the Royal Rat Authority, from Dark Souls 1 & 2, respectively. Very similar fights but Sif fights on his own, whereas the Royal Rat has 4 other grunts whose job are to get in the way as a nusance with toxins. Sif is far more memberable - even before the somber tone comes in.

I’m going to make this an actual boss, one day. Only funner and more vulnerable, and the boss actually tries to fight you without hitting you with weapons, as well.

I used play a now shut down game exclusively devoted to boss fights where your only attack is to place bomb and detonate it, and it was pretty cool.

1:01 surprisingly ended up in Doom (2016). I can't believe they made all but one bossfight kick ass

As an aspiring indie developer, this really helps, I finally have advice on how to fail at boss fights! Thanks man.

Almost no devs put collectibles into bosses which is something that would be super fun and its kindoff an unexplored territory

Don't forget about giant boss that makes you fight him on the small platform while standing over you. Or the boss that runs away and throws stuff at you from a far. Or a boss you are not supposed to defeat first time playing.

Also make sure the music stays the same. You wouldn’t want your boss fight to feel epic or special.

And don’t forget The normal enemy theme is just as intense when fighting the boss, don’t use effort and make a boss theme

I love it when a bossfight has a pattern that once figured out you have to execute perfectly over and over again for 20 minutes Patience is the most valueble skill a player can have

Gotta have that boss in my city builder. And it's my evil twin too!

I think that the vulnerability period can be done well, and the example bad boss (without the excessive health and 20k phases) could be a good mid-level enemy or 1st world boss hypothetically.

Umm... I'm afraid I start to grow inability to tell the sarcasm from the real deal... 😅

One of the samey big turrets that need a bash to kill is the final boss of SANABI. Game still pulled my heartstrings, I recommend ya check it out.

Boy I sure do love sonic superstars

How to fail at polishing a game: you either spend more time polishing the game when all you have is the character movement, or you dont polish the game even after 300 people begging you to do it

To make the boss take even longer (and therefore be more exciting), let it heal periodically throughout the fight. Players love it when it feels like their hard work gets instantly undone.