For the Darksiders 3: Keepers of the Void DLC, I designed the final boss together with the minibosses. Aside from filler attacks, it used abilities from each of the prior 4 minibosses of the DLC in ways that played with each other (e.g. a foot stomp shockwave you have to jump over, and a lightning strike that can strike you out of the air). Additionally, it had some new unique moves to provide more “wow” factor and surprise players beyond the re-mixing of moves they’d seen before.

I designed the boss for 3 phases:

• Phase 1: Introduction of filler moves and single re-use of elemental moves coming from prior minibosses
• Phase 2: Creates 2 elemental swords, introducing new unique abilities of this boss
• Phase 3: Combines re-used moves in new ways, alongside new unique abilities, for final stretch of new challenges built on mechanics players already learned in the first 2 phases

This boss was very well-received externally and internally, and led to boss design being one of the focal points in my career.

I joined Darksiders 3 for DLC development and took over all remaining enemy development, namely some elites, 4 minibosses, and the final boss. The characters already had meshes but no designs, animations, or fx. The miniboss meshes were all the same, and the final boss was a much larger variant of the same mesh. I designed the bosses as follows:

• Create a superset of animations that they can all source from, with varying attack properties
• Create 2 unique abilities for each miniboss variant that provides core gameplay differences, and ramping difficulty to provide 2 phases for each miniboss
• Select a subset of animations and design said unique abilities to provide ramping difficulty and fresh surprises as the miniboss variants are encountered
• Design 1 of each unique ability to have interplay with other abilities, such that the final boss could use 1 unique ability from each miniboss to create a dynamic and memorable final fight