Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Archives for June 2014

Postmortem 4: Hungarfen the Mushroom Dancer

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There are times when you mess things up in a huge way, everyone knows and you can talk about it. Then there are times where you do something well, but messed it up in a subtle way that no one ever recognized.

Today, I want to talk about Hungarfen.

Qualities of a Good Dungeon Boss

There are certain principles which should be present in a good dungeon boss. It shouldn’t take too long to fight, its abilities should be recognizable, explaining to your party what to do should be brief and the mechanics should be reasonably forgiving but not allow you to simply ignore them. 
Hungarfen hit all of these criteria.  The best part? Hungarfen hit all of these criteria with 3 abilities. 
Courtesy of WoWPedia:
    • Underbog Mushroom — Hungarfen summons Underbog Mushrooms at a random location that explode in a cloud of spores after 20 seconds.
      • Spell nature dryaddispelmagic.png  Spore Cloud — Spore Clouds blanket an area, inflicting 1080 to 1320 Nature damage and an additional 360 to 540 Nature damage every 2 sec. for 20 sec.
    • Spell nature stranglevines.png  Foul Spores — When Hungarfen reaches 20% health remaining he releases foul spores, leeching 400 to 600 health from all players within 20 yards every second for 11 sec.

You might look at this list and say, “What a simple boss – he must be boring.”   However, most who have done Hungarfen at an appropriate difficulty level can tell you the fight is surprisingly engaging.  Why?

The Principle of Player Focus

When I started working on Hungarfen I expected him to be a throwaway piece of work, a simple meat-sack to pace-out the length of the Underbog.  Instead, I learned a valuable lesson about game design. 
Geoff Goodman and I were talking about cool ideas for mushroom monster boss and the idea came up of creating Mushroom land mines that you dodged.  However, we found that they resulted in a very binary feel – either you stepped on a mine or you didn’t – meaning the fight was incredibly swingy. 
So I set about to fix that.  In order to increase the clarity of the fight, I decided the mushrooms should spawn in small and slowly grow over time to give a warning that the mushrooms are about to burst. Secondly, once they did burst, they dealt damage as a unique DoT which became increasingly punishing the more mushroom explosions you missed. 
Then we tested the fight as a pair – I faux tanked while Geoff ran around healing. We very quickly discovered the fight became trivial, as we could just stand directly on top of the boss and kite it around the room in a circle. 
So I set about fixing that. My first thought was to add some gravity pull effects the boss. But instead, these became very frustrating to deal with – you had no agency over the situation and it would punish pre-emptive dodging behaviour.  
Next I tried a stacking AoE that burned people who stood next to each other. This worked great… unless you were melee. Then you all just burned to death unless someone else sat to the side crying, wishing they could DPS.  (I noted that this “personal sacrifice” mechanic was a worthy one, much like being the bomb on Baron Geddon, but felt inappropriate for a dungeon fight.)
Finally, after some experimentation, I came upon the following goals:
  1. Discourage swarm stacking. 
    • Why? I wanted people to think independantly
  2. Encourage coordination. 
    • Why? Team work is important.
  3. Have non-binary results.
    • Why? Someone who acts faster should be rewarded appropriate. 
The resulting tweaks were:
  • The Underbog mushrooms prefer locations in front of your camera
    • Players have a better chance of seeing mushrooms as they grow.
  • The Underbog mushrooms dealt extra damage up front
    • Stacked players will be severely punished if they are clumped up. 
  • The Underbog mushrooms leave an AoE cloud that reduces usable space over time
    • Players who generally move as a group have more time to defeat the boss
  • The Underbog mushrooms apply a stacking DoT
    • Chain failures are punished more than sporadic ones
  • Hungarfen does a short-range AoE lifesteal on everyone at low HP
    • The entire party standing on top of the tank will extend the fight a lot. 
    • The tank and a single dps getting caught in the drain will be mild
The result was a fast-paced fight that was simple to understand, can be learned and improved on-the-fly and finally makes players who dodge all of the mushrooms feel like a badass and teams who coordinate have more time to defeat the boss. 
Wow, and all of that one with just three abilities. This was when I learned a pivotal lesson:
The most important part about a boss fight is quite simple: How do the players relate to it?

More abilities is NOT better.

Wait, so what was the big mistake?

This mistake was quite subtle – and also the unfortunate side-effect of the production plan to have each designer working on a dungeon in parallel.  Hungarfen was the first boss, instead of the last. 
Why? Well, Paul C. had already planned to do another Fungal Giant at the end of Slave Pens. Secondarily, I didn’t recognize until the end of development that Hungarfen was a higher quality boss experience than The Black Stalker.  We didn’t want to have two dungeons end with the same creature type… and we had already decorated the Black Stalker’s area to match his art kit. 
We’ll go into more of this in two blog posts, when I discuss The Black Stalker – or How I Learned Motion Sickness Sucks. 

Postmortem 3: The Underbog: Spawning my first dungeon

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Daelo: “I want to try an experiment.”

Me: “???”

Daelo: “We’ve been making a number of dungeons where we all dogpile them, doing bosses and sections separately. Instead, I want to try having everyone create spawn an entire dungeon on their own.”

Others: “That sounds fun.”

Daelo: “Great. Paul, you’ll be doing Slave Pens. Geoff, Steam Vaults. Joe, start on Auchindoun Undead side.”

Me: “Oh, what should I do?”

Daelo: “Take a first pass at the Underbog.”

Me: “Alrighty.”

—-

And away I went. I spent the next couple days doing patrol paths, swarms of creatures, then spent the remainder of the next day setting up flying formations of sporebats that did loops de loops around the map, and finished it off with a cave filled with Silithid which looked vaguely like this:

I proudly grabbed Scott the next day to show him what I had wrought.

Daelo:

(This is pretty much how he talks in real life too)
Me: Amazing, right!?!
Daelo: Did you even pull test this?
Me: What?
Daelo: Pull test. How long does it take to clear this dungeon?
Me: I dunno. Maybe half an hour.
Daelo: Tell you what, turn on god mode, aggro each pull, wait 20 seconds, death touch the pack, then try again.
Me: Alright…
*2 hours later*
Me: Yeah, okay… this dungeon might be a little too long. 

Spawning in Two Parts

There’s two major components to spawning. Pull composition and placement.

What is good pull composition?

Let’s talk a little bit about what composes a good camp
. (Hint, if you’ve ready the rest of my lectures, you’re ahead of the game.)
When you look at this pull, what do you see? Some orcs, right. Here’s what I see:
  1. Non-standard 5-pull
    • Composition: heavily melee
      • One long-range unit, 2 high-damage dual wielders, one two-handed slower attacker
    • Shape – linear
    • Variance – none, units remain static
  2. Silhouettes
    1. Tanky warrior – on point, clear shoulder-pads indicate higher hit points
    2. Hunter – good use of animation to break silhouette and indicate fragility
    3. Dual Wielders – hunches
    4. Two-handed warrior – weapon causes shape to break from the rest of the pack
  3. Texure
    1. Color drain – too much red between the characters and environment causes the individuals to be lost
    2. Armor/weapon pop – to compensate for the above issue, the designer uses strongly contrasting colored armor and weapons to help the stand out
Now, this single pull was done by Tigole (Jeff Kaplan) as Lead Designer in the Burning Crusade.  It’s pretty well done. If you factor in the extra time he spent making them run up into formation, I’d give it a B+ considering the contextual difficulty.  Most designers would have done worse in this situation – making Red orc stand out in a Red dungeon with Red lighting is very hard. 
Some of the difficulties that keep this pull from being an A are as follows:
  • Unclear target order
    • In WoW, ranged units tend to be more fragile than melee units.
    • Typically, you want to disable risky characters who bring CC while you kill the healers or vice-versa. 

    • Normally, you focus those first, however, the exception to that is generally Hunters
      • (Hunters in the player’s mind usually stack extra armor and are tough to deal with)
    • Thus, it muddies the player’s instant decision making upon looking at the group.
    • Similarly, its unclear if the two-handed sword guys are more or less dangerous than the dual-wielding axe guys.
  • Unclear ability expectations
    • This is endemic to WoW, but creatures in WoW can pretty much have any ability. Holding a sword doesn’t tell you much. Even being a Wolf doesn’t mean you’ll have the same behaviour as other wolves.
  • Minimal optimizations
    • Sometimes you can improve your clear rate on a dungeon by separating, splitting or waiting for a patroller to walk a way
I could nitpick further, but let’s be honest here: If every single pull in a dungeon was an A, dungeons would be extremely difficult to build and it would be a rare situation where people appreciated the intricacy. 
However, sometimes you need to make the individuals pop a bit better:

Here on Maulgar, Geoff Goodman made the major, dangerous creatures larger, while the accompanying units have dramatically different color and weapons. If you’re familiar with the Warcraft world at the time, the weapons and garb communicated roughly the same class that was associated with each monster.  (Drunkard??, Priest, Warrior, Warlock, Mage)

This made the colors and shapes a bit more memorable. The unique names also helps a bit.

Back to the Underbog

When I spawned the Underbog, I did it from a place in my mind where there was a bunch of “realism” occupying my mind. It was very homogenous. Everything was clusters of the same creature or creature type spread out over an area.
Now, this works very nicely when you’re in the outdoor world – everything is safe, monsters kind of just chill out. If there’s 10 wolves in an area, that’s just fine. 
In a dungeon, that’s exactly the wrong kind of pacing. Dungeons are (generally) built to be run multiple times. Constant flatness within the area leads to rapid ennui, while varied packs of creatures, in discrete buckets, makes it clear when you can stop and take a break. 
This meant you never knew when a flying pack of sporebats would rush in, ambush you and make a pull 10 million times tougher. So I went back to work. With Daelo’s guidance, I scrunched the monsters into packs, set up pairs of linked pulls and made the patrols shorter and tighter. 
However, I’d still only give myself:

C+ 

Next time, we’ll talk more about the Underbog – specifically the bosses and mini-events you never see.