Another sprint and another milestone complete. Last sprint my focus was very much on cards and how it felt to play them. This sprint I have been focusing on enemies as well as making some improvements to the targeting system used to attack them.
Damage feedback
But before any of this, I felt the users needed more feedback in regards to damage, both to the player character and the enemies themselves. So I added an animation that shakes entities whenever they take damage, as well as having them flash red for a few seconds. You can also see the amount of damage done as a number appears and falls out of the entity. Check it!
Giving feedback to the user is really important for game feel, you can almost feel the impact on the enemy when they take damage and it’s also great to have a bit of feedback for when you take poison damage too.
Random stats
Another small change to enemy stats. I have randomised their health and damage within a certain range defined within their scripts. This makes it more interesting because not every goblin will have the same amount of hit points now and it will give the player more to think about when choosing which enemies to engage.
Goblin sniper
I added my second enemy to the game! And about time too. The sniper tends to hang back, and does a lot of damage with a powerful ranged attack. They are quite slow though and have a small amount of hit points so are easy to take out if you can get close enough. You will see him in some gifs later :-)
The Dark Mage
This enemy is a lot more complicated and was more fun to program. He … she … it? Has four different behaviours and is generally a bit more interesting than a basic damage dealer.
His first attack is a weak(ish) damage missile, that causes a new status effect I’ve implemented called Burn. If the player is burned the next time they move they will take a set amount of damage, or they can stay still and it will fade away. I fun little extra I programmed in was that if the player character is standing on a water tile, they will be immune to the burn attack. I want to encourage users use terrain to their advantage where they can so small features like this will make a big difference to how the user reacts to enemy attacks.
His second attack is designed to mess with the player’s position where he teleports right up close to the player then pushes them in a random direction. It’s a horrible way to flush out the player potentially putting them in the sights of a goblin sniper!
Thirdly, I gave him a supporting ability that gives him and all his friends a shield! I found this very annoying (in a good way) when play testing this ability. I found myself exposing myself to attack a sniper only to realise after attacking him the shield kept him alive and then I took a heavy hit in return!
Lastly I gave him a simple high damage attack just so he is also a direct threat himself sometimes.
The dark mage is also my first higher rated enemy in terms of difficulty. So when the enemy manager is selecting enemies for the current level, he is not going to show up as much in the earlier levels and when he does there will be less other enemy types to compensate.
New cards
I designed a couple of new cards to help protect against some of the new enemy attacks. Starting with a Stone barrier. This summons a wall that you can use to slow down enemies or block sniper line of sight! Very useful card!
The second was another water card. The Water barrier. When you play this card, you ignore the first piece of damage you would take as long as you are standing on water! I’m hoping this will combo well with the Erosion card I implemented last sprint (that enables you to generate water tiles on the fly)
House keeping
Beyond a few more cards and one more status effect I have (code wise) completed all the features needed for my vertical slice! Which is an awesome feeling! I spent some time playing the game and compiled a list of all the things I didn’t like, small bugs, snags, or just little visual issues I didn’t like! I came up with a pretty long list of things I want to polish and make look nicer by the end of March which is the deadline for my Indie Game Fund application. You need to submit a written application in addition to a two minute video about your team, your game and a little bit of your business plan. I’m going to submit all those things alongside a good quality playable demo to help secure my chances at getting funded.
A change of art direction!
I have been chewing on the idea of altering the aesthetic of the game from a sci-fantasy genre more into a fantasy/cyberpunk genre.
Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about the art, the music and the general vibe of the game and I want it to have a slightly slicker retro-future feel with a fantasy universe sprinkled over it. I found some amazing art work online that has really inspired this vision.
Anyway, that is all for now! I will leave you with some cool pictures that which are helping me forge my future vision for the game.
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Thanks for reading!
Great post Rob. Loving your development process. Keep it up!