Master Thesis: Player Reactive Encounter

My Roles: Design Lead, Game Design, 2D Artist, Animator, Gameplay Design, Balancing

This project is the practical part of my Master thesis done at ITU Copenhagen in spring of 2025 and took around 4 months to complete with a group of three. My two collaborateurs are both exclusively programmers, as such all game design duties fell to me. This included all the hand-crafted pixel art, the move sets of both the player character and enemies, balancing, determining how the enemy adapts to player behaviour and translation of ideas into clear concepts programmers can implement. The project and accompanying thesis ended up getting 10 points, the second-best possible grade.

Type: Thesis Project, Group Project (3 people)
Genre: Action Fighter
Duration: 4 months
Trailer: -
Playable here: https://thedragonstar.itch.io/prc

This project is a pixel art boss fighting game. The entire game consists of just one boss fight which has been polished over several months and balanced to have the boss enemy adapt to everything the player can do dynamically. It has unique modes to switch to whenever it changes its phase which are designed to counter whatever playstyle the player exhibited in the previous phase, thus encouraging players to switch up their gameplay dynamically across the duration of the fight.

Screenshots

The final phase of the fight, with an arena full of hazards and the boss in a defensive stance

The boss charging the player with spread wings during the final phase of the fight

Design Process

Evolution of Mechanics

We started out with the idea of making a truly adaptive boss encounter, an AI agent which could dynamically and convincingly adapt to individual player behaviour. For this I designed the players basic move set to be simple, so a manually crafted AI can realistically adapt to it. The player would have four basic abilities: A melee attack, a ranged attack, a dash and a shield. Meanwhile the boss would track how much the player uses each of these four abilities. Then, twice during the fight, the boss would adapt its moveset to counter the two abilities the player used the most, thus encouraging the player to change their behaviour in response.

First concepts of the bosses 8 main attacks, 2 to counter each of the players main abilities. This served as our basis of implementation on which we later iterated.

The Distribution of attacks based on what behaviour the boss currently counters. This still includes a "Neutral Mode" which was later deemed counterproductive and thus removed

After lots of playtesting, iteration and implementation I eventually came to the conclusion that the fight was not nearly dynamic enough to convincingly simulate the boss adapting to a player. I then added special "Transition Attacks" the boss would perform when it enters the 2nd and 3rd phase and changes behaviour. These attacks are different based on the behaviour the boss will now switch into, changing the arena as well attacking directly in a way which is designed to counteract the previous player behaviour.

One of the transition attacks, with the boss first summoning spiky walls as a stage hazard and then spinning unblockable lasers all around itself

A later transition attack, adding slowing pools of goo to the previous walls and trapping the player temporarily within a small cage

In the end, this approach worked out nicely. The unique transition attacks and changing moveset options of the boss succeed in showcasing the adaptation of an enemy to the players behaviour. These, as well as many smaller design choices that were not discussed here, create a successful proof of concept for our idea.

Pixel Art

All pixelart present in the fininished game was created by me in Aseprite. At the beginning, the primary priority after deciding on a theme was making the boss enemies attack readable so we could begin iterating on its attacks and behaviour. For this purpose, i began with creating still frames for each of its major attacks before doing any other animations beyond a simple idle animation. These stillframes served as attack indicators for a large portion of the development cycle, before proper animations could be made to replace them. Some of the frames were also completely replaced to give them a more unique silhouette, to aid in making attacks more readable for players.

Afterwards i began creating full animations and sprite sheets for first the boss, but later also the player. For the boss a lot of emphasis was put on unique shilouettes and color language, with the animations attempting to indicate what way to best avoid the attack. Attacks with blue particles are unblockable, so the player must dash away from them, while attacks with red particles are hard to avoid and should be blocked instead. Below are some of the finished animations and sprite sheets, although it must be noted that many of these were further enhanced with special VFX or extra assets ran though a self-built pixel shader.

The "Trumpetblast", one of the enemies basic attacks

The players basic melee attack

The 16 snowtiles, drawn with seamless combination into a large map in mind

All basic attacks of the boss enemy queued into one animation loop

Aside from the player and boss art, there was also VFX, UI elements, environment and a minor enemy which can spawn during the fight to consider, some of which is also visible in the art examples above.

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