Boss Fights as Spatio-Temporal Level Generation

Abstract

Boss fights are a central component of 2D action games, but procedural content generation (PCG) for them remains challenging because spatial navigation and time-evolving hazards must be coordinated together. Existing boss-oriented generators usually handle scripts, bullet patterns, or tuning in isolation, leaving holistic encounter synthesis difficult to validate and control. To address this, we formulate boss-fight generation as constrained synthesis over a shared time-expanded (x,y,t) representation in a fixed-screen, Cuphead-inspired 2D platformer simulator. Our pipeline sketches a route corridor, validates survival under avatar physics, refines a replayable survival trace, and compares it with a boss-removed scaffold. Through systematic experiments across arena scales and difficulty settings, we show that the representation exposes operating ranges, failure modes, difficulty-control behavior, and boss-pressure diagnostics, with supporting baseline and component trends. By explicitly modeling feasible player space over time, our approach provides auditable solvability checks and mechanics-aware feedback. We view this work as a practical instantiation of complex spatio-temporal level generation, offering a step toward robust, mechanics-aware combat encounter synthesis.

Citation

Xu, K., & Verbrugge, C. (2026). Boss Fights as Spatio-Temporal Level Generation. In 2026 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) (in press).

@inproceedings{xu2026bossfighttimeexpanded,
  author    = {Kaijie Xu and Clark Verbrugge},
  title     = {Boss Fights as Spatio-Temporal Level Generation},
  booktitle = {2026 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)},
  year      = {2026},
  organization = {IEEE}
}