The world of Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure takes place on a huge, interconnected gameplay grid, where characters, objects, puzzles, and exploration all follow the same logic: when the player character, Jemma, moves, the world moves too. And when you step off the edge of the grid in any direction, you “loop” to the other side. With these mechanics in mind, and being a game without a crash state, we certainly had a lot of work to do when it came to designing the boss fights!
We started by establishing a few structural rules for the game world to keep our scope in check and provide a general template for design. Each town has two roughly designated dungeon areas, which at some point introduce elements required to solve a larger puzzle at the end of the town, which we present as boss fights. While they can (and should!) seem intimidating, our bosses are ultimately just larger puzzles that have more at stake in the context of the story.
Some early sketches of the second boss by our artist David Hellman. Featuring eyes, monsters, water, and a bit of an identity crisis.
In a more customary game, you’d have to worry about losing health if you get hit, or even dying and having to start over. In Arranger, that’s not the case, but your progress will still be restricted until you figure out a way to solve the challenge.
The dangers – or rather obstacles – that Jemma must face are always linked to a strange force we call “Staticity,” which is represented in the game by a glowing purple aura around objects. Static objects are unaffected by Jemma’s powers and remain in place as she moves. This is true of all the puzzles in Arranger, but it’s most explicitly expressed in these boss fights: the raw form of Staticity becomes a Static beast, and Jemma must find artistic ways to overcome them, using all sorts of strategies introduced in earlier puzzles throughout the game.
The final stage of the first boss may seem complicated, but by the time you get there, you’ll have developed all the skills needed to defeat that long, immobile boy!
Finding different ways to represent these beasts was a real challenge. We really wanted to express how the scale of the bosses got bigger and bigger as you progressed through the story, to convey that the risk was bigger and that you were getting closer to the source of the problem.
Given the nature of the project and our primary goal of providing players with an enjoyable experience, many of these elements are not represented by the difficulty of the puzzle, but are instead highlighted by the context of the story and visuals.
One of our comic cutscenes featuring the first boss!
The first boss is something Jemma can solve on her own – the worm gets bigger and bigger, with more and more stagnant junk spawning after each phase, making the usable grid smaller each time. Whereas the second and third bosses are effectively the opposite: the grid gets bigger, giving you more room to move, but the steps to damage the boss get more intricate, so you have to employ everything you’ve learned (and Jemma may even need to get facilitate from other characters!). So it’s always a balance between giving players the right amount of room to maneuver, depending on how much complexity and constraints you want to introduce.
Better employ these birds if you want to gouge out all the eyes at once..!
It was really captivating for us – and we hope for players too – to see these elements evolve over the course of the game. It may seem like a natural evolution, but it took a lot of (exhausting) iteration and (nippy!) exploration to get to the point we wanted. Like Jemma, we had to go through a lot of chaos and mess before the dust settled and the true nature of the game was revealed.
Thanks so much for checking out Arranger. We hope it finds its way straight to your heart!
