Boss encounter study. Deterministic state machine, notify-driven hitboxes, input buffering.
Designed and implemented a boss encounter in the mould of Malenia, with tight input-response loops and difficulty that stays fair.
Role: Combat systems. Team: solo. Duration: 3 months. Platform: PC. Tools: UE5 · C++ · Blueprints.
Problem: Elite boss fights are brutal but rarely feel cheap. I wanted to know exactly which mechanics buy that.
Approach: Rebuild an encounter of that class to the frame, then tune until failure always felt like my mistake.
Result: A deterministic encounter where dodges land when the player believes they pressed the button.
Deterministic state machine. The boss never improvises. Phases, attack selection and recovery windows are explicit states, making behaviour consistent enough for players to learn. That consistency is the precondition for difficulty feeling fair.
Hitboxes on animation notifies. Damage windows are driven by notify states inside animation montages, so the active frames match what the animation shows. Attack telegraphs mean something because the hitbox agrees with them.
Input buffering. Inputs made slightly early are honoured rather than dropped. The encounter got harder to beat and stopped feeling unfair, which is the whole trade this project was built to study.