Yogs Boss Fight - Final Image

I've never been a fan of the Yogscast myself, their sense of humor and absent mindedness detract from the enjoyment of watching the lets-play itself. This was somewhat the case with watching the Starbound demo but it obviously was not the game itself that was lacking but the people playing it.

They should have spent most of the time on the surface building and crafting with some underground exploring, but it was the opposite and that caused distress in some of the more antsy diehards out there who wanted to see every feature the game had to offer in an hour. As for the first boss itself, I have no problems with it, the distress beacon must be crafted not found making it more time consuming to summon. Plus seeing the penguin army was awesome lol.

 

Regarding the boss, I did enjoy the "Metal Slug" feel the fight had to it, but the fact that it's a penguin in a flying saucer seemed very underwhelming. I suppose I can live with it since it's just the tutorial boss, hopefully the next 9 aren't as "jokey"

 

I wonder why people are hating on Sips when he was the only guy to bring out the 30 damage sword after getting a gun.

Sips was the Floran, right?

 

Correct. I don't think they're hating on him for pulling out the sword in the last minute. I think it was that as soon as they had access to the guns they stopped using their swords and were spamming bullets to not only very slowly kill enemies, but to dig with them instead of using proper tools because shooting tore through terrain faster lol.

 

The game looks fine. I could have done without the screaming, abrasive let's-players.
"LOOK AT ME, I'M A CHEEKY MONKEY BECAUSE I STOLE YOUR FURNACE!"
Truly the pinnacle of humor and wit. If the dev team had done the play through instead, maybe they wouldn't have alienated most of the crowd ten minutes in.

 

I agree, but he took more than 10 damage while at 0 bars.

 

I just counted because I was really bored and also curious- 8.

 

I guess you're right, I had thought he had been hit by another plasma blast.

Edit: I'm looking at the video very closely now, and in the very beginning, he starts with full life and then takes what appears to be 11 damage and is still only missing one bar? Correct me if I'm wrong but 2-1-1-1 (from penguin) then 3-3 (from plasma blasts)

Edit2: Looking through the whole fight I count him taking a total of 119 damage, but it's kind of hard to read some of the damage indicators, so the range I came up with was 127-107 (possibly slightly outside of this range) but it seems really unlikely that he truely took under 100 damage that fight.

Edit3: On a second calculation, I would have had to have miscounted damage for a minimum of 11 shots summing to 18 damage in order for him to have taken only 100 damage, and this is being slightly generous. (I went through and watched how much damage it took for each bar to drop and I'm still working on finding a consistant number).

Okay, final edit: I find the math behind his health bar really skeptical, even when trying to count things in his favor, my biggest issue is with how much damage he takes before losing that 3rd bar of life (which I have counted at 15[being the only possible way he survives]-25) and that's assuming he didn't get hit by 7 penguin bullets and one plasma blast (for the total of 10 damage). 1:035 for anyone who wants to double check that for me. Sorry this is bothering me a lot, I don't even care if the devs helped them xD I'm just curious to figure out if this was legit/buggy/adminy. Maybe someone else with free time will go through and re-tabulate damages.

 

It is most probably devs doing, as well as spawning 30 damage swords and automatic guns for them. As well as spawning the beacon in that ches, may I say.

 

Well, I believe those were all planted there from the beginning (no dev additions mid-game). I don't know where the spear and the dagger came from, but the swords and the guns were in their ships from the start. I believe that the chest with the beacon was a plant as well, and if they had gone far enough along the surface in either direction they would have found a beacon in a chest.

Just for clarification, I mean "a plant" as in they were put their in advance for the demo build.

 

Atleast that shows that tier one won't actually be that short. Probably will take longer if you go out of your way to craft all the items like I will.

 

This probably only can be true if devs instructed Yogg's on where to go. I still belive it was made mid-game ( I mean beacon was spawned in a chest, that is).

 

The boss has 3000 HP. Subject to change, of course. The penguinUfo might not even stay as the first boss. It was just the first boss that we completed to a reasonable degree.

 

I suppose the devs could have pretty easily put that chest there midgame as well, just when I first saw it my thought was there were 2 placed and all they had to do was go far enough in one direction to find it, but now it seems more likely it was placed.

Thank you very much for the information! But I was actually referring to Duncan's life, which should only be 100 HP unless I'm mistaken?

 

What boss hasn't been overdone, in your opinion?

The only thing I can see that might make a REALLY cool, unique boss is one that deforms terrain and weather patterns on a massive scale. And that's not a Tier 1 encounter.

This is T1. The players don't have any fancy gear. They aren't high level. They only have access to the most basic tech. They didn't have jetpacks, or forceshields, or ninja ropes, or rocket launchers. They had a couple pea shooters and a chipped sword. I would estimate that the boss probably wasn't finished either, like pretty much all of the game.

I challenge you to create a boss that will be both feasibly vanquishable, sufficiently unique, and mechanically interesting for a Tier 1 boss encounter. I think they did a pretty okay job at meeting all of those prerequisites for characters who are essentially technologically stone age, in the grand scheme of things.

 

Games have done far more mechanically advanced bosses where the player character is unupgradeable and has nothing more than a small gun or their fists. In fact the most mechanically advanced boss I've seen in a 2D sidescroller is in a game where the best weapon you can get is a grenade launcher.

 

Just my random 2 pennies: Any boss/enemy is likely to feel overused/less creative to someone, somewhere. There's just not that many unique ideas to go around, and we all pick up influences for cool ideas from all over the place (or just outright want to reference something). I think the more important thing is to use unique ideas in-genre, meaning doing stuff that's new to 2d sandbox adventure/survival/building games, and not worry too much about ideas coming from other areas.

That might bother some people, but there's no way they're going to be able to please everyone. As long as there's variety, I don't see it being a huge problem.

 

Feasibly vanquishable, is easily taken care of by adjustments to the health of the creature.
Let me add stoneage tier taking down a ufo doesn't sound "feasibly vanquishable".

Still alright let me throw this out there. I think someone suggested it somewhere else and it sounded awesome and different enough to me.

Ship raid. Rather then fighting a ufo, you get beamed aboard a ship. In the end you have to navigate though it and steal the component necessary to escape the sector. Rather then your standard singular boss: It will be a boss in a sense of a challenge to navigate a mini-dungon, find the piece of technology, and then escape while being technologicaly-outgunned.

Rather then a stand up fight, your escaping, while finding what you need to escape the system and truly start the adventure.

Doesn't have to have a health bar to be a end of the tutorial challenge.

 

That doesn't answer my question. Upgradeability in some ways makes designing bosses even more difficult. What level should you confront this boss at? How do you confront it? Does it spawn on a zone, or on an event? Will you have a choice when it happens? You now have to take into consideration what kind of weapons will inflict damage. How fast should this boss die if you have the very best weapons in T1? How long should it take to kill it with baseline weapons? Are baseline weapons even going to harm the boss? Will it scale with level? Does it only take damage from explosives? Is it explosion resistant?

This isn't Contra. Just because it's a sidescroller with guns, doesn't mean it's Contra. With more mechanically advanced games comes considerably deeper problems.

 

The stone-age comment was a relative. We aren't looking at human stone-age terminology here. Clearly, they have space ships. They won't be stone-age. Since it seems I can't be facetious, I'll just say 'Bottom rung of tier 1' instead.

Anyway, what you described is not a boss fight - at least that's not a boss in the traditional sense. That's an event.

When most people think 'boss' they think big, mean, super enemy; Not a new or unique thematic challenge. And I agree, that would make an interesting EVENT, it would not fit the bill for a boss.

Now if the spaceship had a huge mech commander at the end, that would be a boss. But the question still stands - how would you make that unique?