Summary
Villain and enemy design is the practice of giving the antagonistic forces in a game — from the lowest common enemy to the final boss — enough depth, motivation, and intentionality to become meaningful participants in the player’s experience. Kristjan’s central argument is that this is almost never done well: most enemies and bosses are cardboard cutouts that exist to fill gameplay space without serving the larger narrative or emotional arc of the game. Fixing this requires not more time, but more intention.
(Kristjan, We Deserve Better Villains, Ch. 4, see source-we-deserve-better-villains)
The Goblin Encounter
The Goblin Encounter is Kristjan’s name for the endemic problem of purposeless enemy encounters:
“The Goblin Encounter is when a player character on their way to do something cooler encounters a group of low-level goblins. A small fight ensues that the player is already destined to win and they do so without issue. It’s a random encounter that just fills in space while traveling to a greater adventure. These encounters are boring, tedious, and time consuming as they have little to no point in the greater narrative.” — Kristjan, Ch. 4
The Goblin Encounter is not specific to RPGs. It is Kristjan’s generalised term for any enemy encounter placed without intentionality: enemies scattered across a level because the art team created the environment and someone needed to populate it, not because those enemies serve a story, create a meaningful challenge, or produce a memorable moment.
Why it happens: Production pressure pushes designers to populate levels quickly. The path of least resistance is placing generic enemy types without asking why they are there.
Why it matters: Players do not remember formulaic encounters. The cumulative effect of many Goblin Encounters is a game that feels padded, incoherent, and disrespectful of the player’s time.
Diagnosing a Goblin Encounter
An encounter is a Goblin Encounter if you cannot answer these questions:
- Why are these enemies in this location?
- What are their motivations for being here?
- Can that motivation be communicated to the player (through AI behaviour, voiceover, environment, or story)?
- Does winning this encounter give the player something beyond progress?
If the answers are “they’re just there” and “no,” the encounter is a Goblin Encounter.
Making enemies vibrant
Kristjan’s prescription is straightforward: treat every enemy encounter as a design question, not a content checkbox.
For standard enemies
Give them a reason to exist in that location. Is this territory they control? Are they guarding something specific? Have they been drawn here by something the player doesn’t yet know about? The reason does not need to be communicated in dialogue — it can be implied by:
- Their patrol patterns
- What they are surrounding or protecting
- Environmental storytelling (see player-guidance)
- Their equipment or visual design
Give them consistent behaviour. An enemy that has a motivation will behave consistently with that motivation. Guards guard. Predators hunt. Cultists are frenzied or reverent depending on context. Behaviour that implies motivation is design; behaviour that ignores motivation is filler.
Even the lowest enemy can be designed. Kristjan explicitly argues this is not just for bosses:
“Enemies in games from the lowest of the low to the biggest bosses could all use a bit of depth to spice up gameplay.” — Kristjan, Ch. 4
For bosses
Bosses occupy a special position: they are designed encounters, not procedural ones. Yet Kristjan observes they often fail in the same way as regular enemies:
“I’ve found that when I ask players if they can recall a boss fight after they have played a game most only remember the ones they had trouble beating as the victories haven’t made an impact.” — Kristjan, Ch. 4
The implication: a boss that players remember purely for difficulty has succeeded at being a challenge but failed at being an antagonist. A memorable boss fight requires:
- Motivation: Why is this character here? What do they want?
- More than one dimension of evil: A boss whose single motivation is “stop the player” is thin. What else drives them?
- The boss as a closed loop: Kristjan describes the boss encounter as “a closed loop where you can play with all of the variables to make it a better and more fulfilling adventure for the player to go through.” This means the encounter can be designed holistically — not just the fight mechanics, but the lead-up, the environment, the boss’s behaviour patterns, their relationship to the player’s story, and their exit.
Boss encounter design questions
| Question | Design purpose |
|---|---|
| Why is this boss in this location? | Grounds them in the game world |
| What is their primary motivation? | Creates readable, coherent behaviour |
| Do they have secondary motivations that complicate the first? | Adds dimensionality; avoids cartoon villainy |
| Can the player learn anything about them before the encounter? | Builds anticipation; makes victory meaningful |
| What does the player feel when they win? | Defines the emotional target; reverse-engineers design choices |
| Is the difficulty calibrated to make the player earn the victory, not just survive it? | Connects difficulty to emotional payoff |
The villain as antagonist vs. as mechanic
Most game enemies exist purely as mechanics — obstacles that generate challenge. A well-designed villain also exists as an antagonist — a character whose presence, motivations, and eventual defeat (or escape) mean something within the game’s story.
The distinction:
- Enemy as mechanic: “There are 12 guards. Neutralise them to proceed.”
- Enemy as antagonist: “These are the warlord’s elite guard, loyal to the point of fanaticism — they will sacrifice themselves rather than let the player pass, and the warlord’s defeat begins the moment the player starts to understand why they follow him.”
The first requires only a balance spreadsheet. The second requires a narrative decision that informs encounter placement, enemy behaviour, and the emotional weight of the boss fight that follows.
Visual storytelling and enemy design
Kristjan connects enemy design to visual storytelling — the idea that art, enemy positioning, and environment should work together to communicate meaning without dialogue or text:
“I like to think of it like treating the art in the game as another character that evolves through the gameplay experience.” — Kristjan, Ch. 4
Applied to enemies, this means:
- Enemy density and variety signal the nature of a region (a fortress interior populated with battle-hardened veterans reads differently from the same region populated with fearful conscripts)
- Enemy patrol patterns imply what they are protecting
- Enemy equipment and visual design communicate faction, status, and threat level before combat begins
- Enemy behaviour at the edge of engagement range (do they rush? hold? call for help?) establishes character before a blow is struck
All of these can be communicated without a line of dialogue or a cutscene. See player-guidance for related guidance techniques.
Implications
- Treat each encounter as a design question: why are these enemies here? If there is no answer, the encounter needs either a reason or removal.
- Boss design should be planned at the narrative level, not just the mechanical level. The boss’s motivation should be established before the encounter begins.
- “Making villains vibrant” does not require significant additional production time — it requires intentionality at the design stage, before assets are commissioned.
- The cumulative quality of all enemy encounters shapes the player’s sense of the game’s world. A world full of Goblin Encounters feels incoherent; a world where enemies make sense and have presence feels lived-in.
Open questions
- Is there empirical evidence (playtesting data, review analysis) that players respond measurably better to enemies with explicit motivation vs. enemies that function purely as mechanical challenges?
- At what production scale does intentional enemy design become impractical? A game with 10,000 procedurally generated enemies cannot author motivation for each. How should this principle scale?
- Kristjan frames villain depth primarily as a narrative/design quality argument. Are there gameplay-mechanical arguments for the same outcome — e.g., enemies with consistent motivation produce more predictable AI behaviour, which produces fairer encounters?
Related
- narrative-design — villain motivation connects to three-act structure, character arcs, and thematic coherence
- level-design — encounter placement within levels; encounters as the micro-scale of the level’s structure
- challenge-types — different challenge types that encounter design can employ
- player-guidance — visual and spatial techniques for communicating meaning without dialogue
- game-feel — the feel of combat encounters; the moment-to-moment feedback layer
- interest-curves — how encounter pacing (and boss encounters specifically) fits into the overall engagement arc
- mda-framework — enemies as mechanics that produce dynamics (combat) and aesthetics (tension, triumph)
- source-we-deserve-better-villains