Design discussion: enemies

[akien-mga]

We should somehow try to plan ahead what kind of enemies we want to implement, and what should be their skills. I think a tower defence is only fun when you have various types of enemies with strengths/weaknesses that force you to build various types of towers, so most enemies would likely be resistant to a kind of tower, and weak to another kind.

To keep things simple, we should probably try to do something a bit systematic like for the towers. If we go with the 3-era theme described in #2, we could have for example 4 types of enemies for each era; the types could be similar in each era and thus work similarly to our towers balancing-wise.

As for the towers, the kind of enemies we chose obviously impacts the art needs of the game, especially if we want the game to have some visual coherence (i.e. we can't just scrape sprites off OGA for all monsters as we likely would have some very different art styles). This can however be seen as a long-term discussion though, if we want we could get start with something heavily OGA-based, and fine-tune it little by little (as long as we have interest in the project, that is ;)).

[ObaniGemini]

I think Skeletons could be the basic ennemies. Tanks could be heavier but slower ennemies. "Zombie horses" could be weak but fast ennemies.

Also I really like when there are terrestrial ennemies and flying ennemies, which need some special towers to be killed/destroyed.

[ObaniGemini]

On slow and strong ennemies, I was thinking about some kind of big wooden totems.

[fry-]

The so far used skeleton is from the Liberated Pixel Cup "theme". I know that there are not too much options available from LPC, but anything missing can be worked on :) Currently I'm making a steampunk robot building upon LPC style. But yeah we have to agree what kind of enemies we want.

@ObaniGemini Tanks are maybe fine for Sci-Fi tier, but (zombie) horses are too big to fit into our limited 32x32 px grid. We need more like humanoid or compact shaped creatures.

@akien-mga I agree with your proposal (4 enemies per era). we could split it into

• standard unit, speed 1x, health 1x
• fast unit, speed 1.5x, health 0.5x
• slow unit, speed 0.5x, health 1.5x
• magic unit, speed 0.7x, health 0.7x, magic ability like: slow down shoot rate of nearby towers

next tiers could bring up higher health / speed rates or add / improve magical abilities to the units.

[ObaniGemini]

@fry- : definition of tank : armed vehicle. It can be a wooden one or a metal one, depending on the era. When I tell tank I just want to symbolize something big, slow and strong.

For zombie horses, that was just an idea like that, but I don't really know what to make as "fast" enemies :p

I think slow unit is too weak. I would do something more like health 4x.

[bojidar-bg]

@akien-mga @fry- I mostly agree with your proposal, but I would do a few changes:

• Magic unit - different magic abilities per era
• Boss unit, speed 1x, health 2x

[ObaniGemini]

@bojidar-bg : the boss unit wouldn't be strong enough with 2x health. I think it shall be 8x health or 16x healt (yes it would be hard, but a boss has to be hard and frustrating). Or were you talking about another monster, a little bit more rare and stronger instead of a unique big monster that would give @fry- a lot of work ?

[bojidar-bg]

@ObaniGemini: Whoops, that's right. So:

• Boss unit, speed 0.9x, health 6x