Two bosses that came from other games

Two of the four bosses in Keeb Quest didn’t come from typing references at all. They came from games I was already playing. One I used to play as a kid. One I still play a lot.

Neither had anything to do with typing. I just kept noticing that something about the specific feeling of playing those games, whatever was making them tense, might be something I could put into a boss fight. Both worked out better than I thought they would. Here’s how each one ended up in the game.

#Falling words

I wanted a boss that felt like panic. Reacting, not reading. Eyes snapping to whatever needs attention most. Fingers keeping up with wherever your eyes go.

At some point while I was trying to come up with the second boss, an old DOS game I used to play as a kid resurfaced. Missiles would rain down from the top of the screen toward cities you were defending at the bottom, and you’d fire rockets up to intercept them before they hit. I don’t think I’ve played it in twenty years, but it came back vividly. Four or five missile trails on the screen at once. Aim at the closest one, fire, immediately track to the next. If you spent too long on one, another would slip past. That feeling of triaging under pressure was what I wanted.

Falling words is basically that game with letters instead of crosshairs. Words fall from the top. You type one to destroy it. If a word hits the floor, you take a hit. When too many words are on screen at once you have to make ugly choices. Do I finish the five-letter word I’m mid-way through, or drop it for the four-letter word that’s a half-second from the floor?

#Word grid

This one came from World of Warcraft. Specifically, from healing. I’m a healer main. I’ve been a healer main in every MMO I’ve played since I was a teenager. I don’t even like the other roles much.

If you’ve never played a raid healer, the mental model goes like this. There’s a grid on your screen showing every player’s HP bar. Your job is to scan the grid, find whoever’s lowest, heal them, pick the next one, heal them. You’re not watching the boss fight. You’re watching the grid. The grid is the fight.

Separately, around the same time I was thinking about this boss, I’d been staring at some enormous spreadsheet at work. I noticed how fast your eye can move across a grid of cells. Way faster than it can track motion, way faster than it can read a paragraph. Grids are basically built for scanning. At some point those two ideas just collided. What if a boss fight was a grid of words, and you cleared cells the way a healer picks targets?

Word grid. You get a grid of cells, each with a word in it, and typing a word clears that cell. The boss’s HP is tied to the grid. Clear the grid, win the fight. You’re scanning for your next target the same way you’d scan for the lowest HP bar, except instead of “lowest HP” the question is “which word can I commit to right now.”

#Why these came from outside typing

I’m not sure every game needs bosses that came from outside the game’s own genre. Probably most don’t. But for Keeb Quest it felt right. The other two bosses (paragraph, line rush) are modeled on typing tests, basically. These two are the ones that feel like something else entirely, and I think they’re what keeps the boss rotation from being just four flavors of the same test. If you stripped falling words and word grid out, the boss fights would all feel like gentle text exercises. They need at least one mode where your fingers are panicking.