LAVA ROBOT BOSS LEVEL

Designer

“Chronicles of the Lava Robot” is a boss encounter where the player fights a mechanical lava-infused robot on a plane in Oblivion. The player has obstacles to avoid, health pickups to collect, and portals to travel through.

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Core gameplay involves the player jumping over the boss’ “flame whips”  - the long lava-textured arms that protrude out of the boss and sweep the floor of the arena as the boss moves around. These flame whips deal 1 damage per contact and considering that the player only has 5 health, it is imperative that they jump over them as the boss spins around. 

In phase 1 of the fight, the boss moves around the arena, and in phase 2 it moves even faster and more erratically, as well as covering a larger area of the arena. All the while this is happening the player must also avoid lava pits, situated around the arena at various spots on the floor. The combination of the speed of the rotating lava whips, as well as the lava pools means that this boss encounter is fairly difficult. The player is armed with an automatic rifle (figure 2), which they use to shoot the main body of the robot. 

Other gameplay features include portals (figure 3), which teleport the player to a designated other part of the arena - handy for when the player is in a tricky situation where the lava whips are near and there are too many lava pools nearby to jump and land safely. The destination where the player ends up after entering the portal is denoted by a particle effect (figure 4), which matches the colour of the portal (there are two portals, one purple and one orange and they both teleport the player to opposite ends of the arena to help with player mobility and dodging boss attacks.)

The boss has 40 health points total and bullets from the rifle deal 1 damage each. Upon playtesting, this seemed to be a good amount of health where the Lava Robot wasn't a bullet sponge, but not a pushover either. 

Originally, I made the rifle semi-automatic but this caused much stress upon the player and ruined the user experience as they had to click the mouse 40 times repeatedly to beat the boss - therefore prompting me to make the game automatic, allowing the player to hold down the left click button to spray the boss with bullets as they dodge around the arena. The boss’ first phase is from total health (40) to 20 health, and the second phase is from 19 health to zero, and as aforementioned, phase two is much harder as the boss moves faster and more erratically, almost as if they have become “enraged” by losing half of their health.