Boss Battles

I am working on a campaign and are going to be having boss battles. I know what you are thinking, boss battles in warcraft 3 suck. This is false, just because noone has implemented a decent does not mean its can not be done. Anyhow I believe that boss battles can be the single greatest thing in a game.

The first boss battle I am doing takes place in a posion forest, it is not really an important battle just a light one. The music that will be used is the final boss from Sonic II (Segagensis). The player will command two heroes.

Any suggestions for a boss battles would be greatly appreciated.

using arrow keys to move and attack would be cool

Here's an idea: If you have a hero with the blink ability, you could make a battle in a lost tomb. Now, how can I describe this idea best... Make it so that they fight in a closed room, where they can't walk on the ground (make it deep water or just place some spiky doodads there), but only on pillars (which are actually just squares of higher ground). So, you have a grid of these pillars and the two heroes that are fighting each other, blinking from pillar to pillar. Now this is where things get interesting: make some powerfull hidden glavie throwers that occasionaly, at random, attack the ground on the other side of the room. If a hero happens to be standing on a square that is on the path of the glavie projectile (which should be sligtly slower than normal), then that hero better blink off that pillar quickly before he takes lots of damage. In addition, have a rune of healing/mana spawn occasionally someplaces, so the heroes have to race to it. If you add some stun ability, or silence, then it gets even more fun (you can prevent the opponent from blinking when there is a glavie coming towards him).

Anitar, that sound like a REALLY cool idea, AuriusRage you have to implement that into your map. And Anitar, if i could give you rep i would but my browser is fucked up.

i and my friend infrane have done boss battles on our escape maps, (frozen island & escape of dimension2)
if you do them well they can be really cool

Anitars idea is neat and doable, I just need to find some pillar doodads you can walk on. Failing that I can use the evevator doddads. ^_^

Just use pillar models with small circle of power pathing and have a trigger set the units heigh when you get to the battle

ooo! sounds nie, I hope you can break the steriotype of boss battles sucking.

BTW where do you get ur music?

while this may just be my love of final fantasy shining through, but i think it would be cool if when a boss battle is initiated, the focus switches to a turn based rpg (or maybe real time, your preference), and there is a nice GUI action list like "Attack / Magic / Item / Wait"

maybe ill look into it personally and then get back to you, i think it is doable really, its just gonna be tricky to set up AI for the boss...

Well, what I meant by pillars is just small patches of higher terrain (you know, under terrin palette, raise cliff by 1), big enough for two units to stand on, or maybe one is enough if both opponents are ranged. Of course, if you get it to work with some doodads it can probably look cooler, but for the gameplay itself it is not so important.

I would also like to thank all the people who gave me positive feedback on this, it's nice to know that ideas are just as appreciated as actual help with development problems.

Edit: in response to the post below: I wasn't thinking of my idea being turn based, in fact, I think it would be much better in real time, since many of elements require you to react to them quickly, preferably quicker than your opponent (that's why I suggested slower glavies, because normal speed would be just to fast for the player to be able to react in time).

Well! so far this sounds great! The only problem with this battle would be that people would expect ALOT from all the others! lol, anyway, i think if you do manage to have a working turn based pattern, you should have a blink phase, a magic phase, an attacking phase and a dodge phase (if a glaive is thrown).... if you cant get this.. mabye try and give a timer for each turn and then freeze the units on one team and unfreeze the other untill one side is dead! im not sure how smmothly it would run but it's somewhere to start i guess!

This is what I am thinking:

The 'pillars' would start off many say 20 or so, then everytime it gets 'hit' the pillar is destroyed. If a hero is on that pillar it is thrown to another pillar and recives damage. Eventually there will only be 8 or so pillars before the 'bosses' behavior changes and he makes a mistake and gets stunned. Finally you have a chance to strike him. After he is dealt this blow, he slams the ground and its 20 pillars again. The boss will require 4 hits before he is dead, everytime the boss is hit his attacks against the pillars will become faster.

Any comments on that would be appreciated.

I got another suggestion to Anitar's idea, make the camera shake during the battle, so it's not that easy to teleport from pillar to pillar.

ok ive officially started to try and make wc3 into a turnbased rpg

hopefully when im done youll be interested in the system to use for your boss battles

so far the startup works. when my hero comes within 200 units of an enemy, all units on the map pause and the camera closes in on just the two (im working on getting it to work for multiple units), then a dialog comes up with the options to attack, use magic, an item, or defend. im currently trying to get rid of the normal unit buttons (attack, stop, patrol, etc.) and make it so that speed has an effect and "defend" actually raises defense. ill keep you updated, maybe ill just start my own thread though...

Howabout the pillars shake when 1 is destroyed?

Btw, cool idea, I really like boss battles from games, if you can make it fun in warcraft then that would be very sweet.