And So It Begins

In my first post, I mentioned that I would be taking a leave of absence from Root.  Well, this past week was the official start of that journey.  I’ve been getting into the routine and have made some good progress.  This past week has been about adding a few more enemy types.

The main current enemy type so far has been a Soldier type enemy.  This enemy type, without getting too nerdy, uses logic to find the best path to the target (in most cases, the hero).  It uses the A* algorithm to compute a path, and some “magic” to not feel so stiff.  This enemy has been great, and can even wield single-handed sword and/or shield combo, single-handed spear, two-handed big weapon, and a bow and arrow.

I wanted to add some more unique enemies that are a ton of fun, but much less “smart”, thus being quicker to develop and less CPU intensive because it is not trying to “compute a path” in real time.

The first I named Reveel:

I wanted an enemy type that could “reveal” — appearing and disappearing, much how the Leever works in the original Legend of Zelda game.  Now that the codebase is there, and I can essentially replace this graphic with my own art.  We can add other types of Reveel objects too by creating a child object of the Reveel object.

Next is a Centipede type enemy:

If you have ever played any of the Snake games, the movement of this enemy is very similar to that.  The idea here is every time we deal enough damage to the Centipede, it will lose a piece, until there is nothing left.  This guy isn’t fully built, but enough of him is there to take a screenshot. 😀

Next is the Minotaur:

This guy has quite the story.  As I mentioned, I wanted some less “smart” enemies.  Originally, the Minotaur was that.  But as I began playing against him, he was just too stupid for the attacks I gave him.  I originally gave him a dash attack and a projectile (fire ball) attack.  Though the attacks worked well, his movement and lack of being smart was weird.  I moved on because I wanted to make the ultimate baddie…

Meet the Centaur:

Anyone who’s played the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild knows that the Lynel is one of the meaner enemies in the game.  However, Nintendo didn’t just make the Lynel tough to be cruel.  They created the Lynel to feel a sense of accomplishment when beating it, as well as getting a ton of loot from what they drop when defeated.  I wanted to create an enemy type that was just as tough and rewarding.

I thought about creating a brand new enemy type. However, after thinking for a while, I decided to merge the above Minotaur enemy with the Soldier enemy.  I took what was good with the Minotaur, the attack patterns, and added the path finding ability of the Solider, and got and even more robust Soldier enemy.  Soldiers can now wield weaponry that was already mentioned and also can perform dash and projectiles attacks as well.  The best part is if I wanted to update the current Solider enemies with these new attacks, it is as simple as adding graphics for them.

It’s pretty cool to see something like the original roughly developed Minotaur become an awesome dynamic enemy by taking a few concepts and merging them together!