The world of Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure takes place on a sprawling, interconnected game grid, where characters, items, 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 “flip” back to the other side. With these mechanics in mind, and this being a game with no fail states, we certainly had our work cut out for us when it came to designing our boss fights!
We started by laying down some basic structural rules about the game world, to keep our scope in check and establish a rough template to design around. Each town has two roughly outlined dungeon areas, which at some point introduce the elements needed to solve a larger puzzle at the end of the town, which we frame as our boss fights. Though they can (and should!) feel intimidating, our bosses are ultimately just larger puzzles that have higher stakes 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 traditional game, you'd have to worry about losing health if you get hit, or even dying and having to restart the fight. That's not the case in Arranger, but your progress will still be limited until you find a way to solve the challenge.
The dangers (or rather, obstacles) that Jemma has to face are always related to a strange force we call “the static,” which we represent in-game with a glowing purple aura around objects. Static objects are unaffected by Jemma’s powers and stay in place when she moves. This is true of all of Arranger’s puzzles, but it’s most explicitly expressed in these boss battles: the raw form of the static becomes a static beast, and Jemma has to find creative ways to defeat it, using all sorts of strategies introduced in previous puzzles throughout the game.
The final stage of the first boss may seem tricky, but you'll develop all the skills needed to defeat that long, static guy when you get there!
Finding different ways to represent these beasts was a real challenge. We really wanted to express how the scale of the bosses became larger and larger as you progressed through the story, to convey that the stakes were higher and that you were getting closer to the source of the problem.
Given the nature of the design and our primary goal of keeping the gameplay experience enjoyable, many of these elements are represented not by puzzle difficulty, but rather emphasized through story context and art.
One of our comic-style cutscenes introducing the first boss!
The first boss is something Jemma can handle on her own – a worm that gets bigger and bigger, with more static debris appearing after each stage, making the usable grid smaller and smaller. Whereas the second and third bosses are actually the opposite – the grid gets bigger, giving you more room to move around, but the steps to damage the boss become more complex, so you have to use everything you’ve learned (and Jemma may even have to ask other characters for help!). So it’s always a balance between giving players the right amount of room to maneuver, depending on how much complexity and restriction we want to introduce.
You better use those birds if you want to poke all those eyes at the same time!
It's been really interesting for us (and hopefully for players too) to see how these elements evolve over the course of the game. It may seem like a natural evolution, but it took a lot of (exhaustive) iteration and (fun!) exploration to get it to feel like we wanted. Like Jemma, we had to wade through a lot of chaos and create a lot of mess before the dust settled on the other side and the true nature of the game was revealed.
Thank you so much for visiting Arranger. We hope it touches your heart!
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