Something I haven’t talked about much yet is the boss design philosophy of Little Nemo. I want to talk a little bit about this more generally, and also focus on one of the bosses and how it executes on my design intentions for the bosses. I think we can safely take a look at the Rocktopus boss fight since this is the first boss encounter which many of you may have already played through in the demo. Also, as a little aside, this is a great example of how scope creep has affected Nemo development: before the Kickstarter, I wasn’t planning on having any bosses in the game. I bring this up because I think it’s kind of relevant to the discussion for a few reasons:
Most metroidvanias have bosses, but they also are usually more combat focused and both you and the boss tend to have large health bars. Although Nemo is a metroidvania, it plays much more like a platformer, which even when they do have bosses, they tend to be a bit different from those you'd see in a metroidvania.
I also tend to not enjoy bosses in metroidvanias (and similarly in souls-likes) as much as others seem to. I know these are often the appeal for players of both metroidvanias and souls-likes, but for me I’m often playing those types of games because I enjoy how the combat difficulty is overlaid and balanced with the exploration. In those contexts, bosses do provide an interesting point of danger to discourage reckless exploration, but ultimately the encounters tend to be less fun for me than simply battling enemies while exploring.
So why did I decide to introduce bosses to Nemo? Well, ultimately I decided that:
I thought I could make bosses that I would enjoy by referencing platformers for inspiration.
I was worried a boss-less metroidvania might simply be a non-starter for a lot of players.
So when approaching bosses, I essentially have two general models in my head: the types of bosses that are often found in metroidvanias that would not be a good fit for Nemo (we’ll use the Legion boss fight in Symphony of the Night as "bad" example of a fight that would not go well in Nemo) and boss fights that better fit a game where you can only take 3 hits before “dying” and which has a stronger focus on platforming (we’ll use Super Mario Odyssey’s Torque Drift battle as an example of a boss battle that I think is more appropriate).
In general, I’ve found platformers like Mario and Kirby tend to have better boss examples for Nemo to reference, than most metroidvanias do. And there are a few things they tend to do which you’ll notice in the Nemo bosses:
They focus on using some new ability you’ve recently gained and pushing your understanding of how to use it fully.
They have 3 distinct phases. This allows them to become less of a slug fest, and more about learning how to defeat the boss. The boss becomes vulnerable at some point in each phase, and you perhaps only need to hit it once to move to the next phase.
They tend to be based on some deterministic pattern. This has the (imo) downside of making the boss feel like something you’re memorizing, but when you can only take a few hits, randomly generated patterns start to feel a bit meaner.
In the Legion boss fight you need to keep whaling on the boss until you deplete the health bar, while the Torque Drift fight is about taking the platformer gameplay from the rest of the level and applying it to a boss context.
So with all of this in mind, let’s see how it applies to…
The Rocktopus 🪨🐙
When you encounter the Rocktopus, you haven’t even acquired your first toy yet. The goal here is to make sure that you’ve built up some understanding and expertise with Nemo’s most basic innate abilities: running, jumping, and throwing. (And I apologize for the quality of the gifs below, but I'm limited with what I can use for inline animations here on Steam)
Nemo dodging the Rocktopus' tentacles in the first phase of the battle
To do this, the Rocktopus sends a series of tentacle attacks your way. Each one has a bit of telegraphing (rocks shaking loose before the tentacle emerges) because ideally the player is reacting to each tentacle rather than memorizing the pattern. But all you can do right now is avoid the tentacles. The Rocktopus’ face is vulnerable at this point, but Nemo does not have any innate attack abilities except to throw something. So once the Rocktopus throws a rock at you, you finally see your opportunity to retaliate, thus ending that phase.
Nemo tossing a rock back at the Rocktopus
And that’s the general flow of the encounter. You do this 3 times, and each time the patterns get a little more difficult to avoid. The focus here is the platforming challenge of dodging the tentacles and ensuring the player has a good sense of how to use our core mobility options before moving on.
Other Bosses 👹
I’m not going to spoil any of the other bosses here, but they all tend to follow this general blueprint of: find a fun and interesting way to force the player to express a bit of skill with the toy they’ve recently acquired in a 3-phase battle with each phase slightly building upon the difficulty.
This all ties into something that I think sets Little Nemo apart from most other metroidvanias. I tend to try to describe it as a “platforming-centric metroidvania”, but subtle distinctions in design philosophy like this are hard to convey in so few words. Ultimately, what I think this boils down to is that despite the non-linear nature of the game and the focus on exploration, in a lot of ways, Nemo has more in common with a Mario or Kirby game.
Thank you for reading and following along. Please leave a comment and let me know if there are aspects of the game you'd like to hear about next month! Until then, Sleepyheads!
-Dave