Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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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. 

Postmortem 2: The Orc and His Dragon

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A few days after finishing Attumen the Huntsmen, level design wrapped up the first dungeon of the Burning Crusade. Called Hellfire Ramparts, it was our first attempt in a dungeon that was closely integrated with the shape of the dungeon outside of the raid.

Scott went ahead and spawned the dungeon, deciding on the density of the packs, the pathing speed of the patrollers and then came into my office.

Scott: Alright, Mr. Brazie (he always called me Mr. and I still have no idea why), I’ve got a big task for you.
Me: Oh sweet, do you need me to test pull all of the bats in Karazhan again?
Scott: Ha. No. I want you to sit with Joe Shely and design all of the abilities in Ramparts.
Me: Whoa, really?
Scott: Yeah, just work together. Then when you finish, I’ve got a boss for each of you.

Joe and I worked together pretty quickly to knock out the ability design for the dungeon, including my favorite part, a little wolf ambush that triggered halfway down the halls. Then we spoke with Scott the next day.

Scott: Alrighty, this next dungeon is a double-header. There’s two bosses at the end and there’s two of you. Joe, you’ve been here longer. There’s a demon boss and an orc with a pet dragon. Which one would you rather do?
Joe: I’ll do the demon.
Scott: Sweet. Then, Mr. Brazie, you have the orc and his dragon. Basically just make fight “Reverse Rend and Gyth” and you’re good. Maybe have the boss flying around before the fight begins. Let me know when you’re ready to review.

Now, I don’t know what your impression of me is, readers, but I love doing the exotic and difficult to implement.

“Why do Rend and Gyth… when I can do *flying* Rend and Gyth!”

… and thus triggered the most painful boss development I had ever done. (ok, ok, it was only my second boss, take it easy on me!)

Development Dollars are Expensive

Choosing where you decide to spend your time as a developer is a very difficult skill to develop. Do you invest a lot in a risky, potentially game-changing design or do you invest in a highly polished, basic experience?  Early on, eager to prove myself, I pushed myself too frequently into the high risk category. 
Some of that’s okay – you’re new, nobody expects anything and readily forgives you if you fail. This is an extremely important aspect of any game design culture. If it’s not safe to fail, you will never push yourself to grow.  However, I recklessly pushed forward in every aspect of my designs. 
So what was the risky, low-payoff decision I made with this fight?  
If your thought was either “oh, it’s because the dragon flies” or “oh, it’s because the dragon lands”, you are close, but not quite. Let’s review his design!

Sometimes You Do OK on the First Try

Rend Vazruden: 
Revenge – Deals cleave damage to the target and two nearby enemies when the target dodges.


When Vazruden reaches 50% health, he calls Nazan down from the sky to assist him.

Gyth Nazan:

Flies around in the air, bombarding enemies, until Nazan calls him to the ground.



Fireball – Deals Fire damage to a random enemy. Only used while flying.


Liquid Flame – Leaves a burning spot on the ground that causes damage to enemies within it for 10 sec.

Flame Breath – Deals Fire damage in a cone in front of Nazan. Only used when he lands.


Dragon Roar – Fears all enemies nearby for 3 seconds, except the tank. [Heroic Only]

Analysis: 

What’s the state of this design? 

Let’s consider the goals:

  • Gameplay: Pick abilities that players understand and enjoy handling.
  • Simple: There were 34 dungeon bosses in Burning Crusade. Dungeon bosses need to be simple, understandible and quick to build.
  • Nostalgia: Remind players of a familar, but underplayed encounter from classic wow.
  • Aesthetics: Make use of the open vertical space. 
  • Training: Give a new designer experience recreating a familiar experience.
Do your own analysis and reply in the comments. I will respond, then update this post afterwards… and tell you about the horrible mistake I made.

Initial Analysis:

Gameplay: 
  • Vazruden is boring. For a heroic, scary orc, he does almost nothing. Furthermore, aside from the random damage from Nazan’s fireballs, nothing is really going on here.
  • Vazruden’s dodge proccing revenge is not a fun mechanic. Furthermore, the cleave plus AoE fire stacking punishes melee groups heavier than ranged groups.
  • Flame Breath is fine on its own, from a pure concept. However, as mentioned by several commenters, the execution was lacking. 
    • Specifically, the fact that he didn’t have a cooldown when he landed meant players randomly died. 

Simple:

  • This encounter is quite simple, right?
  • Actually, no. “Flying” creatures at this point during WoW’s development had to be hand pathed. 
    • This was not only a difficult process, but also hard to modify, due to poor tooling.
  • Furthermore, the presence of two creatures, who can be killed in any order, creates a number of difficulties. For example, which one drops loot? What happens if one creature leaves combat, while another is still alive?
  • These kinds of contingencies make a simple surface encounter hard to implement.
Nostalgia:
  • Success. Subtle, but effective
Aesthetics:
  • This was a huge win… until the fight started. Seeing the dragon fly around was awesome pre-fight.
  • Within the fight, it was a huge dragon… who you never saw because he was above you all of the time.
  • Furthermore, the aesthetics of a flying dragon played against the mechanic of having an attackable add flying around in the air. 
Training:
  • This worked out. However, I ended up going further down the deep end than I expected… because of…

The Huge Mistake

So what was the huge mistake that I made…?
Well, I decided that if the master died and the dragon lived, the dragon would wake up the orc and go back to flying around. 
“What?” you may have said. 
Yes. That single decision ended up taking over a week of my time to implement, fix, refix, fix, find another bug, fix that bug. Patch over the patch. It was a ton of time wasted on a very minor polish point. 
Eventually, Scott came into my office and said, “You know, usually I just despawn and respawn everything.” … and in 20 minutes, the encounter reset and respawned just fine.  
There are times where you’ll just try too hard to make something work that just doesn’t add any value. 

Can we make it Better?

I think the easy answer to this is yes. So let’s take the framework and think through it:
How can we:
1) Make it clearer what Vazruden and Nazan do?
2) Make players care about the mechanics in an appropriate way?
3) Create opportunities for responses that make players feel good?
4) Make the experience more satisfying?
5) Make the boss abilities and theme fit better into his role of a Herald of Illidan?