The world of Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure takes place on a large, interconnected game grid, on which characters, objects, puzzles, and exploration all follow the same logic: when player character Jemma moves, the world moves too. And when you step off the edge of the grid in any direction, you “loop” to the other side. With these mechanics in mind, and a game with no error states, we certainly had to work hard when designing our boss battles!
We started by laying out some ground rules for the structure of the game world, to keep our scope under control and give us a rough template to design around. Each town had two roughly defined dungeon areas, which at some point introduced elements necessary to solve a larger puzzle at the end of the town, which we framed as our boss fights. While they could (and should!) feel intimidating, our bosses were essentially just bigger puzzles with more stakes in the context of the story.
Some early sketches of the second boss by artist David Hellman. There’s eyes, monsters, water, and a little 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 start the fight over. That doesn’t happen in Arranger, but your progress will still be limited until you figure out how to solve the challenge.
The dangers – or rather, obstacles – that Jemma faces are always related to a strange force we call “static,” which we represent in the game by a glowing purple aura around objects. Static objects are unaffected by Jemma’s powers and stay in place as she moves. This is true of all the puzzles in Arranger, but it’s most obvious in these boss fights: the rough shape of the static becomes a static beast, and Jemma has to find creative ways to defeat them, using all sorts of strategies introduced in previous puzzles throughout the game.
The final stage of the first boss may seem complicated, but you’ll develop all the skills needed to defeat that long, immobile boss when you get there!
Finding different ways to represent these beasts was a real challenge. We really wanted to show the scale of the bosses getting bigger as you progress through the story, to convey that the stakes are higher and you’re getting closer to the source of the problem.
Due to the nature of the design and our primary goal of keeping the gameplay experience enjoyable, many of these elements are not expressed through puzzle difficulty but are instead emphasized through story context and illustrations.
One of the comic style cutscenes introducing the first boss!
The first boss is something Jemma can tackle on her own – a worm that gets bigger and bigger, with more static debris appearing after each stage, making the usable grid smaller each time. Whereas the second and third bosses are actually the opposite: the grid gets bigger, giving you more space to move around, but the steps to damage the boss become more complicated, so you have to use everything you’ve learned (and Jemma may even have to ask for help from other characters!). So there’s always a balance between giving the player the right amount of space to move around, 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 once..!
It’s been really exciting for us – and we hope players – to see how these elements evolve over the course of the game. It may feel like a natural progression, but it took a lot of iteration (exhaustion) and exploration (fun!) to get it to feel the way we wanted. Like Jemma, we had to go through a lot of chaos and make a big mess, before the dust settled on the other end to reveal the true nature of the game.
Thank you so much for watching Arranger. We hope it goes straight to your heart!
