Hello everyone! I wanted to take some time to talk about Graves, the Final Boss of Towerborne. This will hopefully be one of many dev blogs featuring Towerborne where I go in depth on some of the design process. It’s worth noting that I am making a bit of an assumption that you know the fight, so I might gloss over some specifics.

For those who are unaware, my name is Isaac Torres. I was the Lead Combat Designer of Towerborne. I started working on the project back in 2022. I was given an opportunity to work with some very talented combat designers throughout my time on the project. Graves may be one of my favorite enemies I’ve ever worked on.

In general, working on bosses is fun. However, it takes quite a bit of effort to make them come to life. There are so many disciplines involved in the creation of a boss and working through all the phases takes time. The more you work on a game, the more you improve your own skills. You may find yourself revisiting older implementations as a result of that.

Working on a Final Boss is something else entirely, though. There is a different set of pressure when working on something that is the culmination of a player’s experience. You have to do something interesting that blows people away, right? In the case of Graves, it was also the culmination of a multi-year development cycle.

— Early Design Iteration —

I always knew I wanted to do something that hasn’t been done yet in Towerborne. Since the very beginning, players and many members of the dev team wanted to do something that felt similar to an MMO raid boss. Towerborne is a side scrolling beat em up, so that’s not exactly the most natural evolution of gameplay. I had no idea if it would be fun but I had to try.

Outside of the character’s name, we had no idea who Graves was or what he would even look like. There were some early discussions about Graves having a human form and a non-human form, so I started with that. The great thing about working with the team who makes characters is that we had a lot of freedom to just throw ideas out there.

Some of my ideas that resonated well with Alex Thomas (Principal Narrative Designer) revolved around a ghostly evil figure. I was always fond of the design of Unknown from Tekken Tag and Final Boss Ansem from Kingdom Hearts. I figure we could just start there.

Due to various complications, the human form of Graves was scrapped. This was good since it helped simplify the design of the character. I originally wanted this guy to possess any character, so this definitely helped keep the scope more focused.

After talking through various ideas with the team, Jeff Murchie (Lead Concept Artist), eventually landed on this design that we all really enjoyed.

— Big Problem —

As with everything in game dev, there’s always something that comes up. In this case, we learned that we were pivoting to an offline only game and that we would be wrapping up the project. This was not originally the plan when we started concepting Graves and the idea of a Final Boss, so this added a new layer of complication.

There were two primary issues:

1. We wouldn’t have a working rig for Graves for quite a while.
   • This meant that we couldn’t actually work on real implementation for the boss right away.
2. Based on the new timeline caused by the pivot, I had to make sure this character was completed in about 3 months.
   • At best, we could finish a boss in 6 months. 3 months, especially for a final boss is quite literally insane.

— My Design Process —

Generally speaking, I like to fail fast. It’s crucial that we have time to prototype and iterate, especially when you’re doing something as big as the final boss. Well, yeah, I didn’t have that luxury at all. Even worse, I still had no idea what I was going to do for this boss.

As I mentioned earlier, he was supposed to be just a little bit bigger than the size of the player. However, once I started to see Graves at scale in gameplay, I knew that his current size was not going to provide the oomph needed for a final boss. Especially one that is meant to feel like a raid boss.

I started to play with the character’s scaling and eventually made him the size of a Marvel vs Capcom boss. This was something I had told the team I wasn’t going to do… which meant I needed to talk to certain people 1 on 1 to walk them through my thoughts. This normally wouldn’t be an issue but it became a pretty big problem due to the impossible deadline.

— Figuring Out Graves’ Design —

Once I had everyone’s buy in on Grave’s rather enormous size, I started writing out what his moves would be. I didn’t have a working rig and I didn’t even have an animator assigned to the character yet. I ended up taking a screenshot of the character model and threw him into PowerPoint.

The basic gist of the character design was to have big moves that cover a wide radius. I wanted players to have to dance around the map, similar to a boss battle in Final Fantasy XIV. The boss also challenges players by acting as an environmental hazard just as much as being an enemy.

This ultimately was a “safe” design that I knew I could deliver. Would it be the most fun experience? Probably not.

Ranged Attack – Laser Mouth

• Graves Shoots a beam that covers the front, upper, or lower section of the stage

Left Swipe

• Graves swipes using his left hand, moving right

Right Swipe

• Graves swipes with his right hand, moving left

Big Overhead

• Graves slams the ground at various spots to create shockwaves
  • Needs multiple versions of this attack so it hits in different spots.

Ground Hands

• Graves summons stuff that appears from the ground. There is a tell something is going to happen shortly before something happens. That way players know the spot something is going to spawn at.

Summon Minions

• Graves does a gesture and Dusker variants of enemies will spawn

Anim + VFX notes:

• Need Dusker spawn in and out for Ryx, Howell, Paloma, Courage
  • Similar to Dusker spawn in anims

— Let’s Get To Work —

Once I had everyone’s buy in on the character’s moveset, we also figured out the primary dev team.

Designer: Isaac Torres, Aviva Schecterson

Animator: Joseph K. Garrahan

Tech: Gabriel Holmes

VFX: Matt O’Neill, Tony Manzi, Tero Mikkonen, Joan Petit

SFX: Bryce Pritchett

Eventually, we got a working rig for Graves. Despite the delay being known, there was still a lot of pressure that I had to deal with in terms of delivering this boss ASAP. It wasn’t exactly a great feeling but it’s something that I needed to navigate frequently. This is my least favorite part about game development.

It’s worth noting that this boss was not our only responsibility. For example, I was also working on a major feature called the Bounty Board and various other enemies and class improvements.

The good news is that Joseph and I had been working with each other non-stop for the last three and a half years. This made quick iteration much faster than it normally would take since we already knew how our brains worked. After a few conversations, we picked a few key animations to prototype.

Within the week, Joseph and I actually had a fully working prototype based on my initial design. He wasn’t playable quite yet but all the pieces were in place to see if the idea was actually good or not.

— Gotta Go Fast —

As I started to play with Grave’s kit, I realized that it really felt like he was missing something. I wanted this character to be a showcase and that required me to increase scope. Actually, I had to revisit a concept that I had originally removed from the design early on.

Towerborne is a sidescrolling beat em up. All of our enemies either face left or right. With Graves, I wanted to introduce the idea of facing the camera. Due to the way our animations work, this basically required us to create 1 side facing and 1 front facing variation of our animations. Idles, attacks, death, etc.

I made sure that Graves didn’t have every single attack available for both facing directions. In fact, I made it a point to make sure that certain directions had unique moves.

Graves’ moveset now looked something like this:

• Has both Front Facing/Side Facing versions
  • Right/Left Swipe
  • Right/Left Slam
  • Ranged Missiles
  • Spawn Explosions/Hazards (Thanks, Ahmet Terzioglu)
  • Move Around
  • Break Bar Apply/Break
• Side Facing
  • Middle Slam
  • Ghouly Hands
  • Laser Mouth
  • Psychocrusher
• Front Facing
  • Clap
  • RockToss
  • Conjure
  • Conjure02
  • Phase Break Wait & Projectiles

This decision ended up expanding Graves’ kit pretty extensively but the team was confident that we’d be able to deliver. Each new move only reinforced the initial design and enhanced it.

The additional I was most happy about was a move called “spawn explosions”. This is a move that Ahmet Terzioglu (Designer) helped with make even better than what I had initially prototyped. The idea is that Graves would spawn various hazards in a specific pattern and then they would explode after a few seconds. Ahmet made it so that we could add a variety of randomized patterns. This really added a new layer to the fight that felt super dynamic.

— That’s Not All —

As if this wasn’t enough, while I was working on this, Aviva and I were also coming up with the breakdown of what should happen throughout the progression of the fight itself. I wanted to go for something a lot more scripted so that the player has this grand epic feel.

Now, when the boss gets put into a specific phase, there is a new phase break moment creates organized chaos and tells a story at the same time. This is the part of the fight where the NPCs play a role. And the new spawn explosions move we added creates randomized obstacles for the player to dodge while avoiding the phase break mini-boss.

Aviva had been working on the AI design for awhile already. It started off with paper design as usual but eventually got into the prototype phase quickly. Without going into too much detail (since that would make this an even longer blog), the scripting came out great and was some of Aviva’s best work. She made it super easy to iterate on and I was able to make a bunch of tweaks easily as needed.

— Playtest Playtest Playtest —

One massive step that hasn’t really been discussed is playtesting. The moment we had something that was remotely playable we basically play tested the boss every day for about 30 mins to an hour. This involved the entire combat team, including the artists.

Throughout that process we played with various ideas. The types of moves that Graves performs at the start of the fight, the enemies that spawn, enemy stats, and general fight patterns.

The biggest issue that occurred in this fight was the amount of chaos. By the end of the fight, we had 3 NPC allies, the player character, possibly 3 co-op partners, Graves, and all the enemies that could spawn. It was incredibly difficult to find the right balance between chaos and fun.

Ultimately, I chose to increase the number of enemies that spawn, create new variants of enemies that added a “twist” to gameplay, but lowered all the stats of enemies so that they could be taken out relatively quickly. The idea was to overwhelm the player but allow them to feel like a badass.

— Conclusion —

It turns out that this blog can go on forever. Who knew that making a final boss could be so involved?! But really, I’m super proud of what we were able to accomplish. Graves looks awesome and he’s really fun to play against. Each NPC has their own little moment to shine, which really helps make the fight feel so damn epic.

It’s crazy to think that we only had a little over three months to work on this boss from prototype to feature complete. The team did an absolutely incredible job literally doing the impossible. It really was the culmination of our skill and passion for this project that made it all possible.

Here’s a video that showcases me walking through each of Graves’ moves. This is typically something the combat team does as we review characters. We get to hear the audio, see the VFX, give feedback on animation, etc. The later half of the video has a boss fight showcase that was recorded and edited by Diddy Kolodziej (Designer). I had to change out the music due to copyright but imagine it plays with music from Kpop Demon Hunters.

Play