Enemies (Week 10 Devlog)

Spearbound Devlog #3

Welcome to the third Spearbound devlog! This week was mainly about implementing enemies into the game, which also included adding health and death mechanics to both enemies and players.

Adding the Enemies

Last week I managed to create a lovely little animation for a magic enemy that will float around and shoot fireballs at the player. This week I added this enemy to the game and began giving it functionality.

Early tests on in game enemy facing the player.

The list of features to add to these enemies were:

• Face the player
• When the player gets too close, enemy begins to float and begins attacks
• Spawns fireballs that chase and damage the player
• Are damaged/killed by spear throws

Majority of the week was spent trying to get the enemy to fly around as intended, as I had envisioned the enemy floating a certain distance above the player, forcing them to have to aim and throw the spear with reasonable difficulty. I unfortunately was unable to provide a working version of this for player feedback, which reflected in the responses (despite all being pretty positive otherwise).

Player Feedback

The version of the enemies displayed during the player feedback session. Enemy shoots projectiles, however enemy perpetually floats upwards forever.

Overall people loved the enemy design and mechanic, however there was a clear lack of being able to murder the creepy yellow guys. Besides this however, there were a few comments on wanting more functionalities for the spear, such as being able to impale it into the wall to use it as a makeshift platform for traversing the environment, as well some sort of grappling mechanic. Both of these ideas had been in the back of my mind when first coming up with the idea, and both I still think would be a great addition to gameplay.

Killing the Enemies (and Player)

The next course of action was adding damage/health scripts to the player and enemies to provide the player with both a risk and reward during gameplay. The player was much easier to add this to, as it only required detecting collisions with the fireball to decrease its health. With the enemy, I wanted to be able to impale the enemy and make them fall to the ground with the spear, which took a lot more work to properly get working.

Final Staff

There is definitely a need for some tweaking here and there with some of the mechanics implemented this week, however all the points I wished to get implemented this week managed to get ticked off, and it is starting feel like a more fully fledged out game with working combat.