Postmortem/Dev Discussion

Was hoping to get some feedback before doing this, but that is looking increasingly unlikely, so I'm just gonna post.

There is one RPG boss who has always stuck with me: Usurper, from Wine & Roses. The boss can take only two actions: "Defiance", a small heal, and "Tyrannical Horror", an ability used at the midpoint of the fight that heals it to full health and inflicts a severe defense debuff. Its threat comes entirely from a passive ability: every point of damage dealt to it would be inflicted back on you.

If it sounds familiar, that's because this was the direct inspiration for Experiment 01. I was fascinated by the simplicity of Usurper's design... but as a battle, it was disappointing. There is no real challenge to it; there is a risk you will accidentally oneshot yourself by opening the battle with a strong attack (as I did, lol), but once you've figured out the trick it's effectively impossible to lose. Why? Because you have complete control over the enemy's damage output. In most fights, you can never be completely sure what's around the corner, and the enemy won't just stop attacking whenever you need a breather. However, Usurper effectively does. If the damage reflection knocks you to critical health, you can just... stop attacking, and you'll be in no further danger. Since characters function just as well at 1% HP as 100%, there's never any risk. Just attack, heal, and attack again. The only way you'll KO yourself is if you do it on purpose.

I wanted to improve upon this idea. How could I make it, if not as challenging as a normal boss, at least not effortless?

This is when the idea of using a loss-of-control effect came to me. By taking control away from the player, they would no longer be able to pull back whenever their characters were in danger. This was also, I think, a clever use of a berserk effect, which is normally not that dangerous in RPGs since attacking is usually what you'd want characters to do anyway. Damage reflection gives a little twist on that by making berserked characters a danger to themselves, even as they're helping you progress the battle.

This style of boss also kinda requires healing to work since otherwise victory is determined entirely by who has the higher HP total, so though I avoided it in Cartoon Battle I brought it in here. I was too lazy to implement healing skills for any of the characters, so I just stuck it on an item and called it a day. I think the finite healing worked to add pressure to the fight, though I still gave you much more than you're likely to need.

Once I actually started testing the enemy, the first thing I noticed is that I needed some way to prevent berserked characters from entering an endless loop where attacking compels them to attack again, which renews the berserk effect, which... I briefly contemplated just rolling with this, but understood that if you got every character berserked, that would effectively mean a game over, just drawn out agonizingly over many turns you have no control over; that seemed too cruel even for me. I also felt it placed disproportionate value on Mage (who already did a lot of heavy lifting in Cartoon Battle), since they were the only character who could cure it.

I briefly considered implementing something analogous to the Alert status to give characters a grace period after Hatred wore off, but decided that was too generous and just prevented Hatred from stacking instead. Easy enough.

The second change I made was to drastically reduce Experiment 01's HP. Originally, I gave it 5000 -- plus the mid-battle heal, that was effectively 7500 HP to chew through. I added more salves to compensate, but it still proved waaaay too long and repetitive for such a simple battle. I ended up reducing it to a mere 1000, and thought that gave the battle a reasonable length.

But after that, the battle still seemed too much of a solved game, the exact problem I was trying to fix -- you could still just attack with Rogue and Fighter every turn and leave Mage free to cure someone whenever they got too injured. So I added an ability that let Experiment 01 inflict Hatred on a random character to keep you from getting too complacent. It kinda felt like cheating, but I think I found that the boss needed at least some proactiveness to be challenging.

I also changed the post-mutilation status effect to Confusion just to make things harder. This one I didn't provide any protection for, since it's conceivably possible that the characters exhaust the effect without hitting Experiment 01 and renewing it. I worried that might make it too hard, but remembered that players steamrolled Cartoon Battle despite my best efforts, so I figured I was probably overestimating the difficulty anyway.

Lastly, I realized that, like with any status-effect-centric boss, you could trivialize it with Chi Shield, so it needed a counter for that. I just stuck a party-wide dispel on its standard heal, which I thought was a decent compromise -- it allows you to have one shot of protection if you time it well, but you can't rely on it long-term.

It's unrelated to the game design, but writing this was a delight. I love it when games have their story and mechanics mirror and inform each other, so I loved getting to do that myself. I think I did a good job of hinting at the battle mechanics without completely giving it away. I hope you enjoyed playing with Experiment 01 as much as I enjoyed writing it!

(The name of the reflector effect is a reference to this Biblical myth, for the unaware. This doesn't mean Experiment 01 is literally Cain; some apocrypha claims Cain to have given birth to a line of monsters which may share his mark.)