Design Dive: Boss Health Bars

Hail, Wanderers!

Boss fights are a core component of many games. They are fantastic and memorable challenges for the player, and an opportunity for designers to present specific skill mastery tests to the player. They tend to be the most challenging moments in the game, or are often intended as such, but that level of challenge brings with it some potential issues. Specifically, it can be rather frustrating for a player to get stuck on a boss, challenging it time and time again without finding success. While that challenge is often a core component of the boss, and in some games that feeling of frustration and struggle is very much part of the core experience, there are ways to help prevent that feeling of challenge from turning to one of angry frustration. While there are many ways to help design rewarding boss fights, today I'm going to take a look at one rather simple component.

This is Design Dive, and today we're looking at boss health bars.

A visible health bar not only provides useful information to the player during combat, allowing them to pace and plan the remainder of the fight around how much health the boss has remaining, but I argue it also can change the experience of the boss fight itself.

Let's look at a simple scenario. The player is facing a boss that takes twenty hits to bring down. Without a health bar, or other means of showing the player how much damage they're doing to the boss, the player's experience with the boss doesn't change up until that final hit when the boss goes down. If the player is struggling with the fight and doesn't know that the boss takes twenty hits, those hits can feel like an eternity, especially if the boss only has a few hits left and the player dies. With no frame of reference, and a sufficiently stubborn boss, it can feel like the player is just smacking away at a brick wall with absolutely no progress being made, and no idea of how much better they'd have to do to claim victory.

And that last point is particularly important. Without some means of conveying progress within the boss fight, the player doesn't have a good way to measure how much headway they're making with each attempt. It can lead to that "How many hits does this thing take?!" moment that, while potentially rewarding if the player is able to keep ahead in the fight, can be immensely frustrating if the player's best efforts don't even seem to be leaving a dent. It can lead to the player questioning their efforts, which if the player is on the right path, can hinder their progress even more.

Now let's add a health bar into the mix. With a visual means of seeing progress made each hit, that formerly inscrutable boss has a definitive end point. Even if the player isn't making much progress each attempt, say, only getting four or so hits in, they can at least see the damage they're dealing and get a sense of how much better they'd have to do. Furthermore, having that HP bar can turn the frustration of a close loss into an exhilarating, if still frustrating, experience. I know speaking from my personal experience with games like Dark Souls, a loss with the boss one hit away from defeat can be compelling in its own right and tends to make the final victory all the sweeter. Overall, having a health bar can provide the player with perspective on their progress in the fight, which in turn helps to alleviate frustration over a perceived lack of progress.

Furthermore, being able to see how close the boss is to defeat can actually change the experience of the fight for the player. Being low on health while not knowing how many more hits the boss has in them can be tense, but I think knowing the boss is also an inch from defeat sharpens the experience. From my experience, and from the experiences I've talked about and shared with others, having everything so visibly come down to the wire really turns up the pressure and can push the player into a more excited mental state while in turn having to maintain the level of skill that got them that far in the first place. For games with challenge as a main focus, the added pressure of a close fight can make the experience all the better.

Beyond just helping the player with information, the way the bosses HP bar is displayed can be a reward in its own right. Having a visual effect to help show how much damage the player does with a strike, such as changing part of the bar's color and having it slowly drain off, can be an additional positive point for the player, helping to reward a well placed or damaging hit. On the flip side, having the player smack at a boss only for the health bar to barely wobble can push the player into a more strained experience. Combining the two along with other design elements such as specific vulnerable points on the boss can make for a nicely rewarding experience. Watching the scratch damage turn into massive chunks of the bosses HP melting away after a good hit can add something extra to that moment of gameplay.

With all that being said, health bars are something of a short cut. It is harder, but certainly more rewarding, to find a way to incorporate that visual progress into the visual design of the boss itself. While it's not necessarily as clear as a simple HP bar, showing damage progress on the boss itself turns a 'gamey' UI element into an immersive part of the experience which, when done properly, can make the fight far more memorable. Taking a chunk off a boss's HP bar is cool. Taking a literal chunk out of a boss with an attack is even cooler.

Gohma, one of the bosses from The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, makes for a fantastic example of displaying the boss's remaining HP via visual changes to the boss itself. During the first phase of the fight, the player's only means of damaging the boss is by dropping a large stone slab atop it. Each time, the boss pushes the slab back into place, but not before more cracks appear on the boss's otherwise impenetrable carapace. Not only is it a nicely immersive way of showing the player the progress they're making, it makes for nice build up to the boss entering the second phase of the fight, shattering the shell after a final ceiling drop.

On that note, many of the bosses in Wind Waker display progress in another manner, even without damage showing up in a HP bar or on the boss itself. The general formula for most bosses in that game has the player use an item to expose the boss's weak point, knocking the boss out of its normal combat routine and letting the player get some hits in. Once the player strikes the boss several times in that 'downed' state, the boss recoils and returns to their pattern. The often dramatic animation the boss goes through as they exit the downed state after taking enough damage really helps to sell the idea that the player's attacks are having an effect, even without any other visual means of measuring progress.

In fact, I'm under the slight suspicion that it's the act of knocking the boss out of their 'downed' state, and not the actual damage done while they're in that vulnerable state, that determines the pace of the boss fight. I am, admittedly, basing that off what I remember from a game I played years ago, but I'm toying with the idea of going back to Wind Waker to test that out. It would certainly be an interesting design choice, so if I do end up testing my theory, and if it has some truth to it, expect to see another post discussing what I learn.

Until then, thanks for reading, and I hope what I've covered here has proved helpful, or at the least interesting.
-Charles