Ra Ra Boom is finally in your hands. I’m excited for you to check out all the hard work and love the team at Gylee Games has put into Ra Ra Boom, which is now available on Xbox Series X|S.
Ra Ra is a side-scrolling beat ‘em up and I thought I’d tell you a bit about some of the enemies that you’ll be beatin’ up. I’ll get into the thinking behind the design behind three of my favorite enemies in Ra Ra Boom.
Making the early choice to add lanes to the environment gave us a fun playground in which to design different combat scenarios for enemies.
The Brute
The Brute is an homage to our favorite roller coaster at our favorite amusement park. We loved the idea of utilizing train tracks as the lanes in the arena. By creating a transforming monster that turns into a coaster cart, it allowed us the diversity needed for a full boss fight.
In Brute mode, we gave a fierce pouncing attack that requires the player to catch his tell before he jumps. That, coupled with a chomp gave The Brute a pretty menacing amount of attacks to begin with. Then he transforms into the coaster and replicates! This forces players to dodge the carts by jumping into different lanes, or take them head on with ranged attacks. We had set out to make a boss fight with different phases, and different options for each player, and I think we succeeded.
Martin
Martin was the very last enemy created for Ra Ra and lives in the Arcade level. As a team, we felt we were missing the opportunity to force the player to do some sort of jumping attack. A flying enemy could solve that. However, the huge challenge with creating floating characters in beat ‘em ups is you have no idea where they are in relation to your own environment.
We found this out the hard way by creating a flying enemy and realizing that it was insanely frustrating to fight. So, we cut it and moved on, until the very end of production.
Thankfully, we had learned a lot through the production process and realized that if we give the enemy some holographic legs, the player can understand where he lives in space because he’s tied to the ground. So, we put a little goofy toddler robot on top of giant legs, laughed at how he looked, and Martin was born.
Bruce
Bruce has been, by far, the most challenging boss to perfect. We’ve gone through many iterations of this boss fight, trying to fine tune the fun. Since the fight was a chase scene, we immediately ran into our first challenge: motion sickness.
It took weeks of fine tuning the parallax background before I could even play it without getting sick! Once that was resolved, the boss fight was really just the chase, with players required only to run away and dodge obstacles. We took this version to GDEX and PAX, and realized quickly that the fight was too simple, and pretty boring to be honest.
This led to the addition of Eugene, a quirky, anxiety driven robot that ran beside your character. Initially, the player used exploding Eugene’s to damage Bruce, but that still didn’t feel like enough. It wasn’t until we slowed down the chase, and gave players back some agency that the fight became fun. After adding a few more phases with attack escalation, we finally landed on a Bruce fight that was worthy of his grand entrance.
Find Your Favorite
And now it’s your turn. Check out Ra Ra Boom today and tell us which enemy you like punching best.
Ra Ra BOOM
Gylee Games