I've been doing tons of work, but posting little updates, so I thought I'd take a moment to introduce some of the support-type enemies to be found in Asunder. As I've mentioned previously, enemies will be largely defined into one of three roles in this game; "Attackers", "Supporters" and "Outsiders".
Attacking enemies are the normal ones you think about in a metroidvania game- they run up to you and slice you with a sword, or shoot arrows at you, or launch energy balls, all many different ways to kill you. Some do it in very tricky ways, having defensive patterns, so forth. They make up the bulk of the challengers. For example, a Goat Mage will float along and blast you with a giant lightning burst that can be dodged by watching where it arcs after rewinding.
Supporting enemies are those that largely can't actually kill you. Most of them have little or no means to kill the player, but instead provide buffs, debuffs, and bizarre mechanics to make other enemies and traps more dangerous. Most normal attacking monsters pose little threat on their own- you can just rewind time and undo any of their attacks. But support monsters can interfere with your abilities or put you in harder to escape situations. For example, the Choker is an undead hand that will run along the ground and jump to snatch you out of mid air, dragging you backwards through time until you've used up all your rewind, leaving you totally defenseless against other monsters- but harmless on its own.
Outsiders are the most elusive of all the monsters, existing outside of the dimensions of time and space. They are totally unaffected by your abilities to rewind time, and can't be normally attacked. When first encountered, they exist only when you rewind time, stalking you while you're travelling backwards, but immobile or invisible in normal time. Going through time backwards, they can actually kill you as you rewind time which can quickly put an end to your little adventure. Later, they start to wake up in normal time. For example, animated swords in the past exist only as pale outlines, but in reverse time will endlessly stalk you.
So heres a few select supporting enemies I've worked on;
Pendulum.
Like its name suggests, these eyestalks hang from ceilings in the future area of the game. They are obstacles you cannot move through, but by simply hitting them with an attack, you can make them swing in either direction- but your attacks alone can't harm them, nor can they kill you on their own. You can swing them enough to run past them, but the only way to kill a pendulum is to send it swinging so hard it hits the ceiling, cracking its pod. One hit sends it shrinking to hide, the second finishes it off. But if you leave them alone and don't interrupt them, the pendulums start channeling an effect that when released, causes time to briefly jump fast-forward into the future. Specifically, it causes time to speed up to 40x speed for half a second, jumping you 20 seconds into the future- nearby enemies will almost certainly kill you and dance merrily over your body in a sudden burst
Gremlin
These little guys are an intentional addition of 'demonic spiders' for the past area of the game. They're very short, small imps that leap madly around an area. They have only one attack- they release a pulse of distortion that has the same effect on you as your attack has on most enemies, reversing your movements for a short duration while not actually rewinding time for everyone else- this can send you whirring right back into a big crusher trap or whatnot. But what really makes these guys annoying is how hard they are to kill- they only take 2 hits to bring down, but once brought down, rather than die outright they start channeling a spell that you need to interrupt with a charged attack, killing them. But if you don't interrupt them in time, they forcibly rewind time 5 seconds into the past- before you attacked them. When multiples of these guys are together, kill one and its allies can bring you right back.
Phase Spider
Speaking of demonic spiders; these guys are one of the most outright dangerous enemies in the game. They're not actually a support so much as attacker, but hey not every enemy will be pegged into one archetype. Few enemies can kill you in ways that you can't rewind right out of, but these are one. Taken at first glance, phase spiders are slow, lumbering tanks with no real offense. If you run into them you die, but at the speed they travel thats the easiest thing to avoid. But then, every once in a while, a phase spider jumps backwards through time, and thats where it gets wonky. They jump from their current position to 7 seconds in the past, lumbering forwards and overwriting everything that happened. If you were near them in the previous 7 seconds, they could easily run right over you and kill you, in the past- everything in the present will change to reflect that, and if you rewind time, you might find you've been dead longer than you thought. The only real way to avoid their huge danger is to stay away from these guys- get too close, and their next timejump might kill you so far in the past that you can't recover.
Supporting enemies are those that largely can't actually kill you. Most of them have little or no means to kill the player, but instead provide buffs, debuffs, and bizarre mechanics to make other enemies and traps more dangerous.
Dude! I'm doing something really similar with H2's newest minor enemy. Basically, it'll have a bunch of different actions that can boost the other enemies around it but it'll also have some offensive capabilities too.
It's cool because you don't really see a lot of enemies like this in a platform game. Not that I've seen at least. Good luck with this, PT!
This phase spider stuff sounds like the scariest thing ever. I mean if it were real life it'd be pretty scary. In a video game there's always the risk that I'll forget how it works and find it unfair, but I'm going to err to the side of scary.
By reading the phase spider's description again.. Well, just how the hell does somebody code something like that?? That's amazing. I'm glad I can draw, hahaha.
This probably won't make much sense, but I've actually got several algorithms and functions that make it work. Basically, the object runs a loop that moves it by 1 frame of action each loop, calling its movement function, then overwrites its current position into the array holding its "past data" at an offset, decreasing each loop tick, and does that up until it reaches zero offset- setting not just its positions, but its animations and other protocol values used in its normal code. At each tick of the loop, a dummy object is set to the players position at that past time, and it checks for collision (via radius instead of mask). If the player was collided, it invokes a function that overwrites the *players* data up until that point, setting his animation & protocol and position values to reflect dying back then, then in the preset, it sets the position of the player to the new location and has him already dead, and inserts a sound effect string line into the deque that controls sound data in a previous stack, and then makes your head asplode with sheer complexity
Its actually just one of several enemies that can 'change the past'. The skeleton archer shoots arrows that travel backwards in time- from his bow at the present, backwards just like an inverse of forwards shooting. And he actually aims at your past location, instead of current location! And the white demon can change the past so he actually did a big uppercut on you out of nowhere a few seconds in the past, if you don't stop his channeling spell.
Its one crazy, crazy game Comment edited by Pixelthief on 12/10/2011
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