After 9 months developing Unicopia, I've spent a lot time thinking about design, but I've only spent about 10% of that time on the core loop. Jump up and down platforms to collect the  gems; reveal and chase the key to unlock the exit; and escape before the ghost catches you. At heart it's a simple arcade-style game, and the loop  is necessarily simple.

Most of my design thinking has been on details. How does the ghost move? How should it contrast with the key? Should moving platforms add velocity to Cornelia, should they affect other entities, and what happens if they crush the player? How do the level timers work? What happens after death?  Should the player be able to balance and run on rolling balls?

As they say, the design devil is decidedly in the detail.

However, one detail I've spend very little time thinking about is bosses. Cornelia's a Unicorn and a pacifist, and at first I wasn't sure it even made sense to have bosses you can't kill. But it quickly dawned on me they have an important part to play. The game's split into 3 realms, and each realm needs something concrete to separate it from the next realm. Some sort of design punctuation, if you will. Something that clearly signposts the end of one realm and the beginning of the next.

While cutscenes definitely have their part to play, the bosses put a playable line under one part of the game, and serve to foreshadow some of the up and coming mechanics. But given each boss only appears once in the game, I initially loathed the idea of putting a lot of effort into each boss. As regular enemies appear across multiple levels, their behaviour needs to be robust as they need to work in a variety of contexts. And that's when it hit me. The beauty of bosses is they only need to work in one place. Bosses can be designed to fit a specific level, and designing boss behaviour is therefore intricately linked with the related level design. 

And that's when I fell in love with boss design. Each boss and their corresponding level serves as the culmination of a chapter in the game. Although bosses take a disproportionate amount of design given their limited game time,  it makes the corresponding level design that much easier. 

Having originally wondered if bosses make sense for my pacifist Unicorn, it dawned on me I could concoct a different mechanism to kill them, which not only moves the story forward, but also serves as the game's first proto cut-scenes. So while, designing bosses can seem daunting at first for a neophyte game designer, when you get into the spirit of it, it's also immensely fun. And as we all know, finding the fun is what games are all about.