Devin Kaas Games

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Nazgul Helm Hammerhand's Boss Fights

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Design Notes

Helm Hammerhand Boss Fight Design

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Part 1: The Scourge

The first half of the Helm Hammerhand fight was originally supposed to only feature a hoard of beasts sieging the castle that were sent by the Helm. This was supposed to give the player incentive to hunt down Helm in the following level and defeat him. After testing my design, we felt that the lack of Helm's presence undercut his connection as the cause of the attack and weakened the moment we were trying to build to with his final fight on the ice lake. To solve this I decided to move Helm into this siege level as well as the following one.

Separately, it became obvious fairly quickly that while the beasts can have interesting game play 1-on-1, once they become a part of a group the player is quickly mobbed and combat becomes somewhat of a slog. They did however work quite well when placed as an environmental hazard with the focus of the mission shifted to the nazgul. The change to let Helm and the beasts mechanics work off each other gave the mission a more epic feel and a much better flow while establishing Helm as an enemy worth pursuing to finish the fight in the next mission.

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Part 2: Fire and Fury

In this level the player ends up facing Helm Hammerhand along with two of his drakes for the final battle. Because the player may or may not have taken the time to do extensive combat with the Drakes in the sandbox I wanted to make sure that they had an opportunity to get a feel for that type of gameplay they were about to face before throwing them into a boss battle. Along the paths leading up to the final confrontation with Helm Hammerhand, I had the player face a series shorter encounters of drake combat to make sure the player had a clear sense of how the drakes mechanics worked in general and as well as a feel for how two could play off each other without also having to worry about dealing with Helm's attacks. I then led the player to the mountain top ice lake arena for the final fight with Helm Hammerhand. Because we laid the ground work of drake behavior on the way up I was now able to use the drakes as more of an environmental hazard that the player needed to react to, while learning the boss fight mechanics necessary to defeat the nazgul.

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System Design

Not only was I in charge of the mission design for the Helm Hammerhand fights I also worked with our game play programmer to design his combat move set. We wanted Helm as a character to have a connection to the games beasts, so we decided to reflect that in his combat. All of his up close moves are feral and melee based. And while the other nazgul have melee attacks as well, his feel much more ferocious, mirroring the rage that we see in his flashback cinematic. I also worked with the game play team to design a set of more passive attacks. 

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Helm is a melee character, the player however has access to a number of formidable ranged attacks. Allowing the player to simply step back and slowly chip at helm from a distance completely diffused the tension of the fight. Just giving Helm a bow or some kind of magical ranged attack felt like a disservice to the persona we were trying to give this character as well as a missed opportunity for some more interesting game play. To solve this problem the ghul summon ability and, my favorite, the pull ability were implemented.

 

Helm's ghuls work to keep the player from staying in wraith vision for to long without having to stop and deal with them. This gave Helm time to close the distance to the player and also encouraged the player to utilize more of the environmental combat ops to dispatch the ghuls all at once. While this helped the problem it was the pull ability that, in my opinion, brought it all together as it managed to enhance combat in a number of ways. First also it kept the player from getting to many hits in without Helm being able to attack as well. But where the ghuls simply provided a distraction for the player, the pull brought them back face to face with their enemy and forced them to deal with his melee attacks for a time. It also flowed well into the other attacks. It made the player feel like Helm as thinking tactically and purposefully pulling the player into the ghul swarm or through a drakes fire ball. On the flip side it also occasionally would work in the players favor and pull them out of the middle of a ghul swarm or the path of an incoming fireball. This allowed the player to feel like they had one upped their enemy for a second and give them a second wind in combat. Both of these outcomes were fun for the player and since neither out shined the other and both led back into combat with Helm it never felt too punishing.