Isabella - Dynasty Shipyard

What I ended up designing was a fight that leaned in to Isabella's command of her army more than her own outright power. She'd call her army to attack the player and then make a Bond villain-esk exit, leaving the player to deal with her creatures. 

Phase 1 - Isabella

• Isabella makes a grand entrance then uses her standard ability kit to battle the player as well as summoning simple melee minions

• Isabella herself is more agile and evasive than previous bosses, combining dashes, dodges, and teleports with attacks to keep players on their toes

Phase 2 - Cannons and Riflemen

• Isabella teleports to a specific spot in the arena, raises her sword, and commands an offshore ship to fire its cannons on the player. After, fighting resumes with Isabella periodically calling these cannons to fire on the players again

• She also adds a new minion to the fight in the form of Riflemen which spawn on a nearby docked ship and which fire on players from range

Phase 3 - Corrupted Tigers (Joven and Oro)

• Having toyed with players enough, Isabella opens the in-arena cages which contain giant Corrupted Tigers and makes her exit

• One tiger has enhanced melee abilities while the other repeatedly spews corrupted flame from its mouth. When in close proximity, the two tigers enhance each other's abilities so players are highly encouraged to separate them 

Boss Navigation and Facing Control

• While we had the ability for out of combat creatures to navigate to a point and execute a specific action, at the time I implemented this fight, we did not have the ability to do this in-combat

• I implemented a new methodology for New World to teleport/navigate to one point, then use a secondary point (both defined in the level editor) to home/align toward. This allowed me to consistently hit a mark and facing for the boss to deliver both her initial cannon-fire call as well as her exit from the fight dialog

• This method would be subsequently used in all future boss encounters that needed characters to nav-to then face a specific direction mid fight

Firing Cannons on Demand

• Though we certainly had the concept of minions, orders, and turrets/projectile spawners in New World, I was the first to attempt combining all three in a boss fight

• The cannons themselves were spawned out of the arena within a ship mesh to give the impression that the ship was firing its cannons on the players

• Combining this with my Navigation/Facing method, I was able to create a really dramatic phase transition where, so long as players are looking toward Isabella, they will see her raise her sword as she says "FIRE!" and the cannons will fire off behind her and arc down into the play space

Minions Outside the Arena

• For this fight I really wanted to add multiple types of minion threats to the player to make them feel like they had walked into an ambush. So in addition to the in-arena melee creatures, I decided to add Riflemen perched outside of the arena playspace that would fire down on the player's position

• Simple platform collision was added to another ship mesh's deck spawn targets were placed in this area

• The end result being that players were highly encouraged to equip ranged weapons to dispatch the Riflemen or else run for cover

Teleport Attacks

• Our tech for teleporting characters was just coming online while I was developing Isabella so my implementation for teleport attacks effectively became best practices for all such characters going forward

Minions in Cages

• Unique to this fight are Isabella's two Corrupted Tiger minions which are present in their cages at the start of the fight. Its is only in the final phase that the gates on the cages open and the creatures become active participants in the fight

• Implementation of this required carefully crafting the structure of the boss encounter phases with triggers for gates, navigation out of the cages, and closing/blocking off the cages afterward

You can have dramatic moments without cinematics if you plan carefully

• It was really important to me to have the moment that Isabella first calls down her cannons to be visually impactful to players but at the time we had neither the time nor budget to do a cinematic

• I was still able to achieve the desired effect though by carefully positioning Isabella during the phase transition so that players are basically forced to look toward her AND the cannons so that they can see the first volley firing off

Players can deal a lot of damage during dialog moments (Could do better) 

• As we learned again and again in New World, players were consistently able to find ways to do drastically more damage than we expected or planned for and in this regard, this fight is no exception

• Since Isabella is so dialog heavy, she really would have benefited from reducing or eliminating the longer animations and dialog that went with spawning minions and calling for cannon fire.