My final boss fight on Remnant and the final fight players had for Remnant 1, as it was the final fight of the final DLC. Designed to be a “true final boss” for players who stuck through all the DLC, it aimed pulled out all the stops and put on a big show, but keep the difficulty somewhat tame since it was a main storyline boss that all players should beat (unlike optional bosses like Iskal Queen). That said, it still provided a challenge and some new mechanics for players to conquer.

Narratively, this was a scientist that was willingly merging with the Root. This was one of the rare opportunities I had to work with concept art on the boss (whereas most of my bosses otherwise already had meshes), and there was the notion that players hadn’t seen anything “this close to the core of the Root” before. So I worked with the concept artist with the idea that the root got more Lovecraftian / eldritch horror, along with some gameplay mechanics I wanted it to support. Namely, that he had floating crystal orbs he could control, and floating magic arms. He’s meant to be a mixed appearance between a gross monstrous eldritch being (what he’s become), and a sort of enlightened sage (how he thinks of himself).

I didn’t find a proper guide video so I’ll explain some of the core moves:

Phase 1, his “middle of the arena” stationary phase:

• His floating orbs would rotate around him near the ground for 2 moves:
  • 2 rotating beams (rotate around to avoid)
  • A slow-moving projectile bullet hell spawner (walk between projectiles to avoid)
  • Note: Both of these were technical design challenges, as I implemented custom sound source logic for where beam sound would come from (nearest point on nearest beam for local client), and greatly reduce how many orbs were emitting sound (only a few of the nearest orbs to the local client)
  • Also note: If you’ve played Remnant 2 you’ve seen more of these styles of moves, but at the time this was a first for us, as both of these are more common in isometric games. I did very early prototyping of these moves to make sure they were even fun in Remnant
• Septagonal cascading shockwave formed by the orbs (move closer between the cascades to avoid)
• Filler missiles / ground slam (evade or otherwise move)

Phase 2, his mobile savage phase:

• Re-uses some of the phase 1 attacks, but uses their slow/delayed nature to try to get physical lunging hits in right as you’ve finished evading his orbs/mortars
• Also gains a cool forward shockwave to catch you off guard from range

Phase 3, his massive “looming over the battlefield” phase:

• His most-mechanical phase, he spreads his orbs across one edge of the battlefield and his massive glowing arms loom overhead, all ready to source magical wide-area attacks
• He does new patterns of bullet hell attacks
• His orbs will emit massive beams 2 at a time, telegraphing their order by when they start charging up. Players have to watch that order and then use it to know when/where to dodge at the right time
• His magic floating arms can telegraph that they’re going to blast the 1/6th of the arena under them (multiple arms at a time), so the player needs to stand under any of the non-glowing arms
• And lastly, one of his magic floating arms may start channeling energy into a corner of the map, slowly expanding a deadly energy field until only the opposite edges of the arena are safe
• For the last half or so of this phase, until the end of the fight, he combines the above moves so the player must e.g. avoid the bullet hell while running to the opposite edge of the energy field. Or spot which area is safe from the magic floating arms AND the beams.

This fight was well-received and was a pretty exciting end to my work on Remnant. An excerpt taken from the description of the linked video, “Another absolutely brilliantly designed final boss fight.” Great to see!

Codename “Blizzard Wizard”, this miniboss was ultimately my first boss where I really sought to utilize the level itself heavily as part of the gameplay of the fight. The director wanted to see some fights that weren’t big flat arenas and I gladly obliged!

Basically, since minibosses in Remnant are “elites with 2-3 new moves to boss-ify them” and always get their own arenas, using the arena for gameplay let me stretch the boss-ification of the fight beyond what we normally accomplished with minibosses.

I designed the arena with an “outer ring” that the player was regularly pushed to fight in, and made his new moves as follows:

• 2 roaming storm clouds that constantly rained dangerous hail down onto the player if they were caught in it without above-head cover (summoned during his intro cinematic)
  • This provided dynamics to the fight beyond just reacting to what the boss is doing, as these clouds were rotating on their own and often “out of sync” with the boss
  • The supporting level designer helped “level up” my design by making the above-head cover have ramps up onto them, where we then put more vertical cover for the next move. This gave players more interesting pathing options
• A summoned destructible orb that spawned continuous ice spikes that flew at the player at waist-height, allowing half cover to protect the player while they shot the orb… but all such cover was destructible, so it forced the player to maneuver around the battlefield through the fight, and provided a sort of fight timer where the player needed to kill the boss before running out of cover (mostly just a challenge on the higher difficulties)
  • Note: This is what regularly forces players into the outer ring where the storms are, since there’s no cover on the central platform where the boss is
• A massive piercing shot that could destroy cover in a single hit, making the player either bait the shot or be quick to find new cover.

This breakdown/guide shows the fight well.

This fight was very well-received for a miniboss, especially given minibosses are usually less memorable given their limitations and lower presentation ceiling. While I was finding a video to show for it, this reddit post showed up:

One of my most challenging bosses to-date, both for players and to develop. She was a common fan request of people wanting to fight her, as she was an NPC in the base game that you couldn’t fight. For the Swamps of Corsus DLC, she was the premier boss fight, and designed to provide some serious challenge for returning players to butt up against if they chose to fight her after she warns you many times to not press your luck. Given the uniquely high difficulty, we had to really nail the clarity for players to be motivated to stick it out and beat the fight.

The fight was designed with 2 major phases:

• Phase 1 is her “commander” phase, where she uses her magic and her insect army to fight the player from range, while she’s heavily armored and mostly immobile
  • This is her more “mechanical” phase where players need to learn certain moves and how to handle them
• Phase 2 is her “screw it I’ll kill you myself” phase, where she sheds her armored carapace, manifests a massive scythe blade out of her staff, and fights you herself
  • This is her more “soulslike” phase where the thing to learn is animation timing, patience, spacing, and attack windows.
  • This was also a sort of “proof” of how we could accomplish a soulslike fight in Remnant without running into the “but the player just ends up kiting the whole fight” issue, balancing out her up-close aggression with ranged attacks and mobility.
  • This phase also featured 3 sub-phases that she flows between of fighting you with ranged attacks, melee attacks, and flying attacks

All in all, this breakdown video is better than me explaining the moves in text.

One little side-note, the “exploding beetle on the arm” was a technical design challenge for me, where I ultimately did some custom networking in Blueprint to make the explosion “favor the client” on iframe timing when it comes to multiplayer, to be fair to higher-latency connections. I also gave her custom logic in target selection in phase 2 so she could gracefully switch targets mid-evade. Both of these pieces of logic were used for other bosses afterwards, like Unclean One’s alt kill slam re-using the “favor the client” as it had similarly fierce timing demands.

She really tested the extremes of what we could make, especially with relying on devs to put time aside to playtest her (only ~3 people internally could beat her, and it took a lot of effort, much like the most difficult Souls bosses). In the end, while some players certainly got frustrated with her high difficulty, she was my best-received Remnant boss, getting many posts dedicated to her and comments like “A legendary boss fight that I’ll think back to when playing other games”

Codename “Splitter”, this was another boss I was asked to quickly rework before it was released. It was the only boss being added for the first free DLC, and had been made long before the boss designs shifted away from being very add-centric. So in this case, the fight was just a pre-existing normal enemy that split off copies of itself, as well as spawned copies from the edges of the arena. I only had about a week to rework it, so my approach was:

• Make it so the split-off copies all share the same health pool, and there are no otherwise adds
• Make it behave more like a hive-mind, coordinating attacks between the copies
• Give it 2 new moves that utilize this approach
  • A shockwave attack, so clones could stagger the shockwave in a rhythmic way
  • A “continuous heal until staggered”, so clones in the back could start this and cause the player a sudden priority shift and fix the monotony of just kiting the group of clones for the whole fight
• Adjust its existing “throw axe” projectile move to be more boss-like (exaggerated tell, more deadly, more exciting visuals), with coordination between the clones
• And since this fight naturally favors AoE builds, add some explosives to the arena so single-target players can utilize those to not have the fight drag on / get some really satisfying AoE hits

The rework was very effective at turning the fight into something memorable, unique, and challenging, which targeted returning “let’s check out the free DLC” players well.

This fight was nearly finished at the time it was given to me, but it was given to me because it was on the chopping block. Basically the request was to see if I could take over the fight and save it from getting deleted, as people simply weren’t enjoying it at the time. Ultimately my changes were pretty simple: Focus on the fun, clean up some clarity issues, and reduce annoyances.

Focus on the fun:

• I made him start Koolaid-man’ing through walls, and throwing his hammer at you through walls. These were surprising first-time experiences (featured in a lot of funny clips), and made the arena change shape as the battle went on
• He had a “spin to win” move with his hammer, I made it track less well and exhaust him, so once you got out of the way you had some good opportunities to lay into him and watch him spin
• I made his ass a weakspot (I mean look at that thing)

Reduce annoyances:

• He was using fungal zombies as adds, which were a very tanky and complex enemy, and they trickled in from the ceiling throughout the fight.
  • I adjusted them to come from pots in his room, so their spawning was more predictable (you or him destroying the pots)
  • I made his various attacks 1-shot them, so you could bait them into his attacks
  • In line with “focus on the fun,” we made custom fx for the zombies to really explode in goo when he hit them
• Reduced tracking on a lot of his moves while making them deadlier, so they could be more of a “WHOA I almost just got smushed” that’s actually somewhat easy to avoid, instead of a constant iframe check

These changes worked well, and he became a quick favorite for a lot of the “It’s just a fun boss” type lists, and was used to show off the game in the run-up to release.

Later on, in the Swamps of Corsus DLC, we returned to this boss to give it an alternate kill, wherein we gave it a secret fight. I had players get in a pot, a soft reference to Dark Souls 1’s “get in a bird’s nest” (and they later had “get in a coffin” in Elden Ring, though that was after Remnant), and then players could fight him. It was mostly the same fight, except he had a new very-telegraphed special move that you had to iframe, and he switched his hammer with an axe that he would throw more often, as he had multiple in the room.

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.