Valve's Michael Booth, in speaking to a group at GDC 2009, discussed the origins of Left 4 Dead's Boomer and Smoker bosses. There's also a little something about how the game started off as nothing more than a world of gray boxes. If you can make a world of gray boxes fun, you have yourself a great game on your hands.
While there isn't too much more that we omitted, feel free to head on over to Shacknews to read the full article.
How the Smoker Was Born
We had a situation early on in playtesting where survivor teams that were really disciplined and moved through the world like a SWAT team tended to dampen their own drama, because they just handled everything. So we added the Smoker so that every now and then, their perfect little plan was going to get messed up.
The Birth of the Boomer
"The original purpose of the Boomer was to break the rule of shoot everything that moves. Before we had threats like the Boomer, everything that moved became blam, blam blam. By adding threats like the Boomer, as soon as you hear him the area you have to change your thinking.
"The original Boomer design had some flaws. Originally the Boomer was a bomb, so when you shot the Boomer, he just exploded and dealt huge amounts of damage. That totally solved the goal of making you think when you shoot... but had real problems with new players.
"We also had another creature at that time which was the Screamer. He was a guy in straight jacket... if he saw you he'd freeze, and if you didn't take him out, he'd run off and scream. And if he screamed, all hell broke loose... That guy had all sorts of discovery issues. [Booth explained that the Boomer and Screamer were eventually merged.]"
Obviously, if you listened to the developer commentary in Left 4 Dead, some of this is already old news to you.We had a situation early on in playtesting where survivor teams that were really disciplined and moved through the world like a SWAT team tended to dampen their own drama, because they just handled everything. So we added the Smoker so that every now and then, their perfect little plan was going to get messed up.
The Birth of the Boomer
"The original purpose of the Boomer was to break the rule of shoot everything that moves. Before we had threats like the Boomer, everything that moved became blam, blam blam. By adding threats like the Boomer, as soon as you hear him the area you have to change your thinking.
"The original Boomer design had some flaws. Originally the Boomer was a bomb, so when you shot the Boomer, he just exploded and dealt huge amounts of damage. That totally solved the goal of making you think when you shoot... but had real problems with new players.
"We also had another creature at that time which was the Screamer. He was a guy in straight jacket... if he saw you he'd freeze, and if you didn't take him out, he'd run off and scream. And if he screamed, all hell broke loose... That guy had all sorts of discovery issues. [Booth explained that the Boomer and Screamer were eventually merged.]"
While there isn't too much more that we omitted, feel free to head on over to Shacknews to read the full article.