Aether

Aether's intended boss designs changed considerably during the early days of its inception, but once the dust had settled, I had a few key components set in stone to work with for creating Mavit:

1) Mavit would be massive in size. A game about killing titans needed big enemies

2) Mavit would have three phases of escalating danger, a tried and true formula I'd been using in D&D boss design for years

3) Mavit would be stationary. Due to technical limitations and us having to reduce our scope from what had been initially planned, Mavit would be stationary and instead turn to face the player slowly.

4) Mavit would be mostly projectile-based because we had limits on how much animation we could reasonably make or reuse from websites like Mixamo. It took a lot of time, and we didn't quite have that.

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First Steps:

Following this, I laid out my first few attacks, which seemed easy to program and fun: a slam attack, an array of lasers to track the player as they moved, a tornado of energy to chase them, and explosions that would be generated around the player to force them to change course. I began creating their blueprints and VFX, sometimes focusing too much on the VFX, which cost me some time perfecting a few attacks. However, it was a good teaching moment about what needs to be done first to have that playable product. Looking good always comes second to a fun game.

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Second Pass:

Once the initial attacks were ready, creating the boss's actual AI took time. I was mostly unfamiliar with Unreal Engine 5's AI system but quickly learned it through trial and error and some invaluable tutorials on YouTube. The AI changed repeatedly throughout the project, but I designed it so that I could shuffle attacks between different phases of the boss fight without any issues, allowing it to be as modular as we could hope for.

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Back to The Beginning:

Well, it turned out that playtesting is incredibly helpful. After bringing in my other teammates to test the fight, they overwhelmingly concluded that it was too complicated to survive. The boss attack cooldowns were nonexistent, which created this incredible feeling of "OH GOD, EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE," but also meant that survival was impossible. So, I went back to the beginning and massively nerfed the boss's damage output to keep the arena alive and let the player live for over a minute.

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Crushing Realizations:

The hardest part about creating Aether wasn't the VFX, the Boss design or worldbuilding. It was us as a team stepping back and realizing that with all the work we'd put in, the game just wasn't fun. The player mechanics were sluggish, the gameplay loop never quite clicked, and the boss design, while flashy and fun, wasn't as exciting as we'd hoped it would turn out to be. So, we made the tough call between redesigning the game from the ground up or moving on to a new project with Aether to be kept in our back pocket when we'd have had enough time away from it to clear our heads. Ultimately, we chose to move on, and Aether is a world I can't wait to return to one day.

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