Clank! Legacy 2 Design Diary – Bosses & Battles

In our first Design Diary, we looked at the Character Journals coming in Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic. This week we’ve been previewing the new Bosses on the way, and we’re back to take a look at how you’ll be facing off against new foes!

One of the things many of us love about the original Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated were the opportunities it created to work toward a common goal, and the way that sometimes it was more fun to delay your escape for a turn, so that a competing player could finish a shared quest. There’s deep potential in cooperative and semi-cooperative play, so we explored that very early on.

Designing cooperative Clank! cards is a totally new thing in the world of Clank! Now you could heal other players. You could care where other players were, and move them. Cards that help everyone become upside. Choosing players to help is fun. When everyone’s working together, you can shift card balance, increasing the power and appeal of cards throughout the game.

Our first attempts at co-op play in development felt fun and intuitive, but didn’t feel like Clank! – those early drafts were scoreless, and it just didn’t support the same play pattern of rushing in to get the biggest artifact you dared to and then rushing against time to get back out. We eventually settled on a pretty exciting approach where team score matters in most of the co-op games, so you’re still incentivized to get points and collect artifacts.

Another big question was whether to adopt the common co-op rule that if any player is knocked out, the team loses. On one hand, that’s a great way to make sure people are taking care of each other; on the other hand, that pushes players to play it safe so that they’re not the cause of a team loss. There were other factors, but it made the most sense to keep the feel of normal Clank!, so while a team member getting knocked out most definitely impacts the group, it’s not an automatic loss.

“There’s no hero without a villain.”

If you’re going to cooperate, you’ve got to have something to cooperate against: A global challenge or common enemy. Villains are wonderful narrative devices, because they put a face on the conflict: They can hit us where it hurts, give us someone we can all hate, making victory all the sweeter (and defeat all the more motivating).

During the develop we had a villain event deck of sorts for a while, which would unveil the next step in their plot at unpredictable intervals. I used Schemes from Clank! In! Space!: Apocalypse for a while, telegraphing what the villain was up to and challenging players to thwart them before it was too late. These each had their charms, but we couldn’t depend on them to apply the kind of near-constant pressure or wrenches-in-the-works that fun villains are known for.

But what if there were a deck of cards that could surprise you, and those cards moved through the Adventure row, showing how close the villain is to pulling off the next mischievous part of their dastardly plot?

Boss cards immediately showed potential. They present threats that you can plan around, because you know how long you have to deal with them. At the same time, they can impact play immediately, keeping you on your toes. Most importantly, they demonstrate both the villain’s methods and motivations with some dynamism. Each Boss deck is essentially a little analog AI, enough so that each Boss has a personality: pursuing unique agendas, in different ways.

Boss cards are tarot-sized, partly to help differentiate them from other cards in the Row, partly to imply the scale of their effects, and partly because some of them do a lot, and we actually need the space for their game text. That speaks to the hardest part about designing the Bosses; because they can have unique effects on the game in multiple ways, and because they do a little something every turn, they can complicate things very easily. I addressed that primarily in two ways: First, making sure bosses only do multiple things at once when absolutely necessary; Second, saving the more complex bosses for later in the campaign.

That ensures the challenge grows as your co-op Clank! skills do, building up to an epic final Boss Battle. Just as there are opportunities to cooperate during the competitive games, there are subtle opportunities to compete during cooperative games, but make no mistake, your group is going to have to learn to put aside their petty differences and work together in order to prevail.

Want to learn more? Check out our Design Q&As! Part I Part II

We’ve been blown away at the reception we’ve received so far and the thousands of players who’ve joined in on our first Kickstarter. We’ve still got one more surprise in store before we wrap up the campaign