In Selenopolis, a world based on Egypt, my goal with our content was for the player to develop positive relationships with avatars of the Egyptian gods. Players encounter avatars of the Egyptian gods called Immortals. These encounters teach players a combat puzzle mechanic tied to that god's domain.

Players develop this relationship in three stages:

1. Narrative introduction

2. Adversarial encounter

3. Partnership encounter

Players learn the history and identity of the Immortal through their quest. Then, they face the Immortal in combat, learning the puzzle rules embedded in the encounter.

In the final battle against the Bard, players can summon the Immortal as an ally, triggering powerful attacks by solving those same puzzle mechanics. This final encounter occurs in four stages, facing the Bard in different combat archetypes in each stage.

The player summons one Immortal to help them per stage, using the information they learned about the Immortal's combat behavior from their adversarial encounter to strategically select an Immortal for each stage.

In addition to his spell list, Anubis has the following special behaviors:

• Anubis will begin by casting full damage resistance on himself

• As the player reaches 70%, 50%, and 20% health thresholds, Anubis reduces his resistance

• After the second round, if the player attacks Anubis, he will give them the "Hunger of Anubis" spell

  • Hunger of Anubis is a self-hit, allowing the player to lower their own health manually

• If the player reaches below 10% health, Anubis will cast a spell on himself that doubles the player's damage against him

Anubis rewards players for inching closer towards death. This increases pressure over time, putting players at more risk the closer towards a win solution they become. As an ally against the Bard, Anubis will cast a stronger damage buff for the player depending on these same health thresholds. If the player reaches below 10% health, Anubis will cast his special attack against the Bard.

To build a connection between the player and the companion, the two must play strategically together. Players in Wizard101 have reached significant power spikes, so an enemy that feels comparable to the power level of a player is rare. Players needed feel glad to have the Immortal with them. But the Immortal shouldn't simply win the battle for them--that wouldn't create a meaningful connection either.

I designed these encounters to mirror each other. First, the player opposes an Immortal in battle, during which the boss has a specific puzzle strategy that must be utilized to defeat them. The Immortals' behavior teaches the player how to act. 

Then, when the Immortal joins them in battle as an ally against the Bard, the Immortal begins their puzzle again. Only this time, it isn't against the player--it is the way to combo attacks. Executing the puzzle correctly will trigger a powerful attack from the Immortal.

To keep this learning consistent, it was essential the Immortal's puzzle solution as an enemy and as an ally were exactly the same. The player should feel rewarded for what they learned from their previous quests. Any behavior I designed for one needed to work in the other and be communicated clearly to the player. 

Additionally, these interactions couldn't interfere with the Bard's own abilities. Therefore, I designed the Bard's behavior to be independent of the player or Immortal's actions. The cooperative play with the Immortal was the focus of the encounter, so the Bard heavily countering the player's attacks would only make executing these combo attacks too frustrating to achieve.

With these four Irk battles, I aimed to challenge players' dominant strategies without strictly limiting options to do so. Instead of driving players towards a singular puzzle solution, I designed these behaviors with no specific execution strategy in mind. I set out to put pressure on their toolset in a different way each time and encourage them to find their own methods of overcoming it.

• Rage overwhelms the player by stacking hanging effects that deal damage over time, requiring the player to think and act fast

• Desperation stacks defenses the player must explicitly remove or hit around to deal lethal damage

• Despair stops buffs but accelerates the player's own damage

• Paranoia acts via its anticipation the player's next move, encouraging the player to think about the order they execute their strategy

In addition to its spell list, Rage has the following special behaviors:

• Rage casts a +25% fire damage global at the beginning of the battle

• Every turn that the player begins with 6+ pips (power points, the resource for spellcasting), Rage casts a damage over time on the player

• If the player casts a spell that costs 7+ pips, Rage detonates all damage over times, removing them and dealing their full damage instantly

  • This includes any damage over times on Rage

• If the player casts an accelerant buff, Rage reacts by casting its own random accelerant buff

Rage builds up damage implements gradually, focusing on damage over time that quickly overwhelms the player. Some players found success by building towards a one-hit-knockout before Rage can build up lethal damage. Others outlast the battle with a chip strategy, dealing frequent smaller hits to keep their pip count low (avoiding the damage-over-time stacking).

This approach to boss design provided each Irk with strong behavioral identity. At high level, they are easily categorized (Rage is the aggressive one, Desperation is the defensive one, etc.), but the behaviors within that framework were largely unique from each other and abilities utilized by other Wizard101 bosses. Paranoia even employed a condition players hadn't seen before--reacting off the number of power points of a specific school the player accumulated.

Players responded positively to these battles for their strategic engagement and stress of dynamic play. If a player asks for advice from players in game or in the community on one of these encounters, responses include a variety of strategies employed successfully by players, proving each battle was a unique challenge providing breadth for players to experiment with their own solutions.

Some even identified my thematic approach to designing the Irks' behaviors, such as this poster in the Wizard101 reddit community:

"After having played Wallaru, I noticed that the three bosses- called Rage, Desperation, and Despair, in that order- seems to be based on three of the five 

stages of grief. Maybe I'm not the first one to notice this but I'm drawing some connections.

After denial, the first stage of grief is anger. Rage is another, albeit more intense, word for anger, and the boss fight feels like it is supposed to symbolize 

what rage is like. Like anger, he does huge damage in bursts and also burns you down over time, similar to how an angry person would say multiple unkind 

things that build up and hurt feelings.

Then, there's Desperation. This matches with the next stage of grief, called bargaining. The connection works because when you are bargaining in the 

context of grief, you are desperate for any chance to get back who or what you lost. Further, the desperation fight is a battle against an opponent who 

does everything they can to protect themselves (without trying very hard to hurt you.) He'll even resurrect himself, again, desperate to stay alive.

Finally, there's despair, which matches quite well with the final stage of grief (excluding acceptance, which happens at the end of Wallaru:) Depression. 

This boss is all about weakness- a good symbol for depression, where you feel weak, helpless, and hopeless." -u/Wiz101deathwiz

These are other considerations that drove the design direction and difficulty tuning of these encounters:

• Each Irk is stylistically and thematically very different. There was good design space to link a series of battles together that could provide a very different experience depending on which you were fighting. While I designed their fights to be structurally similar, the strategies players utilized against each varied widely.

• These battles were solo encounters, serving as a sort of skill check towards progressing to end-game content. Players who were struggling ended up socializing more, seeking guidance from players in common spaces of the world to talk strategy.

• Each Irk battle takes place at the end of a mini-arc in Wallaru's storyline. I thought it valuable to approach these battles as a sort of palette-cleanser, a capstone at the end of each milestone to shift the players' focus. Otherwise, our players tend to rush through our content without really consuming it.

• While players face many bosses throughout Wallaru's storyline, Wallaru is the concluding world of the Arc 4 narrative. Freddie Kroaker may be the main antagonist of Wallaru, but these Irks are about Daesin, the only thread the player has to the greater Arc 4 story during Wallaru until the concluding final battle after defeating Freddie Kroaker. I wanted these battles to be notable, to remind the player what the greater threat is.

• Similarly, this is not an easy task they have with Daesin. Daesin has been attempting to grapple with his emotions in all of Arc 4, and this is the culmination of that. It is a challenge to overcome complex emotions such as Desperation, Despair, and the personifications of them should be just as challenging.

Problem: Over the years of updates, combat systems were layered into the core experience without proper onboarding to teach players how to use them. This alienated returning players and endgame players were struggling because they never adopted systems that were now integral to the game.

Objective: Rewrite the onboarding flow through the introduction of each new mechanic to ensure thorough teaching and a pace that doesn't overwhelm the player.

Result: Players now have in-game answers to their questions. New players will be comprehensively introduced to new mechanics during their main quest experience, no longer causing confusion when endgame content utilizes a mechanic they never properly understood.

Since its release, Wizard101's combat systems have grown massively, from new spell mechanics to different ways of acquiring the power cost for your spells.

However, these new systems were not accompanied with new combat tutorials to explain them. The original tutorials were made by a programmer, and no current designer knew how they were scripted or how to make more. Players simply had to trial-and-error their way to understanding or consult the forums for an explanation.

As a returning player who had experienced the bombardment of new mechanics that alienates your understanding of the game, it was important to me to reintroduce these systems with combat tutorials at a pace that graduates with the content.

I deconstructed existing Lua tutorials to learn how to author them, wrote beat lists for the player's actions and the narrative explanation, and integrated these new tutorials into the quest flow. In the first rollout, we backfilled tutorials for existing combat systems Archmastery and the Magic Wheel and created one for the newest mechanic, Spell Fusion. The following year, we reinvented Shadow magic as Shadow Pacts and adjusted Shadow's entire onboarding flow with a new combat tutorial to support it. We have several more mechanics that will get this treatment in the future!

Players praised the tutorials for their comprehensive and progressive teaching of the systems. Now, when returning players ask in community spaces "How do I use Archmastery?", players will point them to the tutorials as the method of learning. Several returning players have even stated they chose to simply begin a new character for the full onboarding experience at the pace we've now set.

(Of course, we would prefer players have the tools to get up to speed without restarting the whole game over, but that's for a future initiative)