Is 70 mini bosses too much?

Hi everyone,

In my current game you'll be a demon hunter and your job will be tracking down and banishing these guys - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonarchia_Daemonum .

They'll be side bosses and will help you develop your character, the 7 main bosses will be arch-demons such as Leviathan and Beelzebub.

I'm wondering though, is it a bit too much? I know that most people have the ''more the better'' mentality and that these bosses will be mainly optional (though catching some of them will make the game much, much easier) but at the same time I feel like some people will just quit as they'll get bored. I'll do my best to make them as varied as possible but there is only so much you can do in VX Ace.

What do you think?

I guess it would depend on how long your game is and how many areas there are to visit. I think it's pretty typical to have at least one mini boss per area. Though it's also common for certain story events, dungeons, situations, ect; to call for several mini boss battles in succession before clearing a boss. If I think about some of the games I love and enjoy, they DO have a ton of mini boss and boss battles, but those games are quite long and very story intense. I think if it all makes sense and you can keep it varied (like you said) and from going stale; it will simply be an element of your game.

Yeah, to me it depends on how big the game will be in general... like if ur gonna put in those 70 optional bosses in a small world, I don't think I'd like it as that would probably mean that I'd be seeing these "optional" bosses quite every now and then...

You could make it a bit easier on yourself by having say 2 or 3 of those be in the same encounter and have several of those encounters where you fight more than 1 at a time. Not only would it make easier to fit them all into a game, but also will let you come up with some varied boss strategies.

Yes.

Why don't you try to make the more mundane encounters more exciting instead of spreading your creativity among 70 bosses?

My initial reaction is that with so many of them, don't they stop being mini-bosses and just start being another enemy? But I could be wrong and like with most anything, done right and well it can work.

Is your game going to be bosses only?

70 is a rather large number, even for a long game.  I think it might be best to just pick your favorites out of that list, or as was stated previously, feature multiple in the same encounter.  Another thing you can do is have different means of encountering them so the game doesn't become just about finding and fighting them.  For example, a few of them could be standard mini-boss battles, while others might instead be rare, one-of-a-kind enemies that appear randomly in certain areas, sort of like the roaming legendaries in Pokemon but they don't necessarily have to run whenever they're encountered.  You could even make mini games out of some of them, where the monster forces you to play a game before you battle it, or perhaps instead of a fight.  The game will be a lot more entertaining if you mix things up instead of simply making it a gauntlet.   

Pretty much yes. It's mainly a puzzle game where you're a detective and track them down so they'll be the main enemy. I'll throw some henchmen along the way but it won't be ridiculous with every enemy having a small army - maybe 5 or 6 henchmen for the pretty strong demons will be enough.

Well that changes everything! I still think 70 is a very ambitious.

My suggestion: 5.

5 core storyline hunts, and a bunch of side-hunts. As many side hunts as you have the patience to make.

The "core hunts" being the main focus and required for beating the game. The side hunts are there to give the player more to do, and to make you as a developer feel like you're not making the player do too much just to get to that plot resolution. 5 is a good, solid number for the main game.

I should clarify: the core hunts should have significantly more content than the side hunts.

As much as 5 sounds more reasonable, I'll have to go with 7, one for every deadly sin for the consistency's sake ^_^

The side bosses will be somewhat similar to dragons in Skyrim, defeating them will let you learn skills and improve your stats, meaning that the more you kill the easier the game will be, but at the same time there is so much backstory for most demons that making them original shouldn't be as hard as making them from scratch.

I've never heard of the 7-act structure.

I've heard of the 3-act-structure and the 5-act-structure, but not the 7-act-structure.  Don't make your player say "when will this game be over?"

Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not a thing. 7 point structure is my favorite outlining method, and the resulting story isn't necessarily longer or anything, it's just a way of doing the outline.

Even if the 7-act is a thing, is a relevant thing?  Case in point:  the film The Dark Knight has five distinct acts.  After Bats captures the Joker, there's a last act in which a) Batman goes after Two-Face and 2) the audience is saying to themselves, "there's still more movie left?"

So...don't make your game too long.

That's not how it works. You can put any plot into any outline structure, I could use the 7 point outline to describe any movie you name. That's besides the point anyway, this isn't about the plot structure of a movie, it's about the bosses you'll find in a game. Megaman has 9 per game, people don't complain that it's too long. You just have to structure the rest of the game to support it.

I think it's not so much about making it too long, but making it too padded and adding unnecessary scenes/areas into it is what's bad.

"Gotta catch 'em all" was the first thing that came to mind.

Actually with all the things I've read in this thread, if anything it might be too few. However that depend more on how hard/big are the individual puzzles VS how many areas there are.

Given the concept of the game, it sounds very interesting. I think that since the bosses are going to be optional, some of them should be hidden or unavailable at first glance, but your player has to solve a puzzle or something of that sort to find the correct rituals to summon the demon. You might also implement a concept where the amount of these optional bosses you defeat could lower the stats of final archdemon bosses up to a certain point for each miniboss killed.

Only if they are dull and repetitive.