Several months ago I started writing about some examples of enemy designs I had done back when I was still actively looking for a Design job. I never finished this breakdown, but since I'm low on content for Blaugust, I figured I'd go ahead and publish what I've done so far and count it as a free post for the day! Easy!
At some point I'll probably revisit this post and finish it up with pictures and more examples from FFA and possibly Gloom Busters. For now, I hope you enjoy reading about a few enemies I had a hand in designing.
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Battle Bows Enemy Designs
Battle Bows is a cooperative VR Archery Tower Defense game where you protect your castle from invading balloon enemies.
I designed the Battle Bows enemies to come in three styles:
- Basic -- Always defeated in one shot and not immune to any damage from powers
- Advanced -- Mostly still defeated in one shot and have various features that make them harder than basic enemies
- Boss -- Multi-hit enemies with a twist and always finding unique ways to indicate damage states rather than using health bars
Details of each enemy design are below.
Basic Enemies
The main difference in how basic enemies behave is with their movement speeds and characteristics, for example:
- The Cyclops is the slowest enemy with the most predictable movement.
- The Speedster has a repeating jumping pattern and moves much faster.
- The Ninja is the fastest of the three and has points programmed into its pathways to pause in place as if to appear they are hiding behind a tower, house, or tree.
Basic enemies are the meat of the game. You'll always find one of these three enemies on the board and while at first they're not a threat, eventually there is a sense of overwhelm that comes with them swarming in numbers.
Advanced enemies
One of my favorite aspects of this design is that most of these enemies give skilled players opportunities to kill them outright with a single shot, or they'll require a trick to defeat them, for example:
- The Flier is a Cyclops mounted on a cloud. If you hit the enemy instead of the cloud, it is defeated. If you hit the cloud instead of the enemy, it tumbles to the ground and begins to path to the door. The flier can float over the wall and go straight for your heart, so you must deal with them quickly.
- The Phantom can be defeated with one hit, but only when it stops to recast its invisibility spell, otherwise, it is invincible.
- The Golem drags two bombs behind it. You have to destroy the bombs to blow up the golem. The golem can destroy themselves at the door or heart for a huge amount of damage, so while they move slowly, they are deadly if you ignore them.
- The Necromancer has three shields that circle around it. If you can aim for its head, you will avoid the shields altogether. The necromancer is named such because it occasionally drops eggs onto the ground that hatch into one of the three basic enemy types. It also can throw a brain bolt at the player that will obscure their view if they don't dodge the projectile.
- The Rocketeer raises on a platform from a point in the level, ignites their rocket, and shoots toward the heart. It is the fastest enemy in the game. You've got to hit the rocket, not the balloon, so, most times, this enemy will take two hits to defeat.
- The Warlock is a slower enemy that likes to lurk along the edges at first and shield itself and other enemies. If an enemy has a shield, you have to pop the shield before you can defeat it.
These advanced enemies begin to be sprinkled in as you get further in the game. For example, you may find only one flier per tower at round 3, but by round 5 there could be as many as three fliers per tower. This not only gives you time to get used to how to defeat an enemy but allows for complexity to build over time.
Bosses
The bosses were by far the most fun and complex enemies to design.
- Cubert is a single-hit boss that sits within a spinning six-sided shield that has three charges per side.
- Snoozer has three eyes that require three hits each, but you have to use a power to wake Snoozer up before the eyes become vulnerable
- Blinky has five eyes that require three hits each. The catch here is that eyes can regenerate back open if you don't take them down fast enough.
- The Bomber King circles the outside of the castle alternating between throwing gunk at the player and making free throws on the heart with a bomb.
Every four rounds, a boss appears near the mid-point of the wave. At wave 20, players will begin to encounter two bosses every fourth wave.
Increasing Difficulty
We had to cap the number of enemies that could appear in a wave for Quest 2 optimization reasons, so mid-development we decided to add a move speed, base attack damage, delay timer for the first attack, and then a general attack delay for each enemy. As gameplay progresses through waves, these values adjust to make the enemies more difficult. This also allowed us to define a clear point in gameplay when damage values and speed from enemies would be so extreme we could do our best to avoid infinite gameplay, which would make network costs unpredictable.
FFA Hero Design Examples
Fantasy Fighter Arena (FFA) was a turn-based wrestling game that focused on collecting and leveling heroes. Ultimately the game was canceled in prototype, but it was the first time I was able to work with AI scripting to design how heroes would behave when controlled by the computer. In addition, building and balancing a "kit" for heroes was incredibly fun to do.
We began FFA in a paper prototype setting. As an example, one test character I built at the time was a zombie called "Dusty Erodes," who focused on damaging other heroes who attacked him.
As time went on, Dusty became a female fire elf who had the same kit, but different visuals that still made sense. Instead of being damaged by a contact poison, damage over time was caused by fire. We needed more female characters in the game and you definitely don't want to touch someone whose skin is made of fire!
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Happy Dueling!
