My first boss on Remnant, I wanted to shift our boss designs away from relying on adds for challenge, and inject a bit of MMO-style boss mechanics while keeping the fight intuitive (i.e. no buffs/debuffs you need to read, and overall players shouldn’t feel the need to look up guides). I was given the fight when it was in an early incomplete state, so I redesigned it with some existing themes and animations in mind: namely, the original fight had the boss duplicating itself in a cocoon, a swipe animation, floating movement, a bridge arena, and continuously spawning wisp adds.

I redesigned the fight with the following key features:

• The fight starts against a single boss on one side of the bridge, allowing the player a chance to learn each move in a safer environment
• Once the boss has taken substantial damage, a 2nd boss appears on the other side (behind the player), providing a sort of “phase 2”
• While both bosses are alive, they coordinate their attacks such that one boss is attacking very predictably (simple left-to-right beam attacks after a really long charge-up period), and the other is using the attacks the player had already learned. This lets the player focus on the “active” boss (shown by it staying close to the bridge to attack, which coincides with staying in the player’s “no damage falloff” range), while needing to pay some passive attention to the other boss when it starts its slow left-to-right beam.
• Once a boss dies, the other enrages, unlocking a targeted version of the beam attack, which requires well-timed dodging or high tankiness. This also motivates players to realize “I should kill both at the same time”, which provides an alternate reward (every boss in Remnant had “alt kill” conditions for alternate rewards)

Aside from the left-to-right beam mechanic, the bosses had the following core moves:

• Filler swipe attacks
• A corrosive grenade that left an area of denial for ~12 seconds, causing the bridge to be harder to traverse. Keen players could bait these to edges of the bridge, or just be mindful and avoid them.
• A wisp summon move that acted as a “shooting gallery” skill check, where wisps died in 1 hit, but would explode in the player’s face if they didn’t kill them in time
  • This scaled with multiplayer, spawning wisps on both sides of the bridge if more than 1 player was present. Keen players would have the player(s) without boss aggro handle the wisps that spawned behind them.
• A DPS check when the bosses were going to switch phases — they’d charge up a scream with big FX concentrated on their heads, and players needed to deal enough damage (primarily with headshots) to stagger them out of their charge-up, or take massive damage (typically lethal). Once this attack was over, the previously active boss would back far away, and the other would stay close to players and start actively using dynamic attacks

These sequences would repeat with some randomization of move selection, allowing for a dynamic bossfight without set “phases” per se, just a shifting focus and some soft phase-like mechanics of “single boss”->”dual boss”->”optional enraged solo boss”

This fight was divisive for its difficulty, but one of the most common favorites externally and internally, and ultimately had a large impact on boss design direction for the whole Remnant series. Due to the desires to see more bosses in Ixillis’ footsteps, I was put exclusively on bosses for the remainder of Remnant’s development, and led boss design for all DLCs.