Project: Asunder
| Project Started: |
24th June, 2009 |
Last Update: |
20th September, 2012 |
| Project Owner: |
 Pixelthief |
Project Members: |
Pixelthief |
| Project Type: |
WIP |
Project Progress: |
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Grinding away
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Posted 19th Aug 11, by Pixelthief
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So all this time tuning up the engine and spamming out content has given me good pause to think about the game design principles at work here. Anyway, I've come up with something of a loose structure for opponents you meet in the game, whether they are enemies, traps, bosses or "outsider effects".
After all, in this game, the player will have no HP bar. Its quite intentional- everything kills you in 1 hit, or doesn't kill you. The real boolality of that lets me design enemies in a much more interesting and dynamic way than most games allow. For example, in a castlevania game, what can enemies do to you?
They can deal damage to you- a small amount, a large amount, either way, its just an arbitrary number. They can interfere with your movement- pushing you into "knockback" or "hit recovery", which is often more deadly than their damage (I'm thinking of you, medusa heads). And then, some enemies have secondary effects- things like "poisoned" (more damage) "frozen" (no movement) "cursed" (no weapon) "slow" (half movement).
Overall I feel its a very limited scope of mechanics, and the enemies, while looking disparate and perhaps behaving differently, largely all do the same thing. And they rarely interact with one another in a meaningful way. Skeleton 1 hits you for damage, what does Manticore 2 care?
So in Asunder, enemies/traps/etc are largely divided into two categories, often taking from both fields: Those that can kill you, and those that help other effects kill you.
For example, the Skeleton Warrior enemy walks up to you and stabs you. Not especially creative. And 1 hit kills you, and you can rewind time to escape it when it happens with no threat. The Choker enemy, however, cannot kill you on its own. It has no damaging attack- its only attack is to grab you and drag you backwards through time, expending your ability to rewind. And on its own, a choker is powerless, but annoying. But when combined with other threats, it can combo and easily kill you outright- a Choker that drags you backwards onto an enemy Skeleton Warrior can end the game.
So I've been coming up with lots of variants in how enemies can interact with both time and space to kill you, or disable you, in creative ways. My list so far is;
Death
Death in your past
Death in your future
Death while you rewind (sap time and kill)
Charged Up Death
Forcibly Reverse Time
Sap Rewind Time
Speed Up Time
Slow you down
Rewind you
Push you (force vector)
So there are some enemies that can kill you in creative ways. One I'm programming today, powers up a big attack over a few seconds, and if you don't manage to interrupt him in time, will instantly kill you 3 seconds in the past. Not just killing you, but traveling time to 3 seconds ago and killing you. The enemy I worked on yesterday, a sort of Wraith, can't kill you directly- but has two attacks, one a large, slowly rotating beam that pushes you offscreen and saps your rewind time, and the other a close range attack that rewinds you, making your hero uncontrollable for a moment as it retraces its steps.
In the end, I'm trying to design all the enemies to indirectly interact with each other to make formidable obstacles, because when the player has the ability to rewind time (and later, even slow down or speed up time at a whim), you need a different breed of monsters to pose a threat.
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