Tuesday 22 October 2013

Designing a New Enemy

We wanted some bigger enemies and saw two directions we could go in:
  1. Large enemies with a lot of health (like the boss sphere thing)
  2. Large enemies composed of lots of smaller enemies
We decided to try out option 2 for a few reasons:
  • More explosions are more satisfying
  • The entire body being destroyed acts as a natural progress indicator
  • Different types of blocks can be used to make some parts easier/harder to destroy
Before starting we came up with a list of questions, here's a few:
  • Will it look as cool in-game as it does in our imaginations?
  • How many blocks are needed in order to make the object identifiable?
  • Can we still use the same pool manager to optimize spawning of these larger creatures?
  • Would we be able to animate these enemies to bring a bit more life to them?
We decided our first experiment would be a dragonfly. We came up with some 2D concept block configurations, then came the fun part of turning the pixel art into an actual 3D enemy.


So far the experiment has been successful which means you will hopefully see some cool enemies in the full game.