Concerning Enemies

[NimbusBP1729]

We have to be cleverer in our use of enemies, I think some happen to have too much power, so we should ease people into their use through gameplay.

1) We should decrease the amount of hippies in the hallway. That's the very first thing that the player interacts with so it doesn't make sense to bombard them.

When the player returns to the studyroom after the Gilbert battle there can be more hippies.

2) We should increase punching to have a damage of 2. this means it will only take 2 punches to kill a hippie. Still less effective than jumping(which seems fair)

3) We should scale which enemy type you encounter based on progress forest-1 should have a bunch of passives and maybe one enemy that follows you when you're nearby. forest-2 has mostly enemies that try to follow you, forest-3 can have raging enemies and so forth.

difficulty scaling

1. Scenery can't hurt you, but you can hurt them: monkeys, cats
2. Passive can hurt you, but use fixed paths We desperately need more of these and they're fairly easy to implement.
3. Followers can hurt you and try to follow you if you're nearby them
4. Ragers become temporarily invincible when you hit them and run at you

The general rule in forest levels should be if you haven't seen a level 1 enemy, you shouldn't have to deal with a level 2 enemy and if you havent seen a level 2 enemy you shouldnt have to deal with a level3 enemy

I'll include more subcategories if anyone has input.

List of enemies we don't want: Enemies that Blow Up to Kill You Enemies that Blow Up When You Kill Them Enemies that are Cloaked Enemies Who Get All Their Life Back Enemies that Randomly Become Invincible Enemies that One-Shot [Kill] You Enemies that Won't Sit Still Enemies with [too much] HP

[Source]

[CalebJohn]

Love the ideas seems good, but i think we would need more enemies before we could do anything with this

[MEGATRUCK]

I was just playing the game and I was thinking the maybe if we had a Reddit post describing all the enemy codes there are right now (acorn/snowman code, manicorn code, etc.) then people could have an idea of how to create new enemies, and know how they can act in the game. You could also specify that we need more of "x" enemy type.

[didory123]

@MEGATRUCK I think what we need more than anything are sprites for the enemies. It takes one to actually code them, but creating good sprites is the real challenge. That said, a reddit post to discuss this is a great idea, you should write one up.

[NimbusBP1729]

@CalebJohn more enemies should theoretically be an easy thing to do.

I think there's an aggressive desire to overdo enemies. We only need to have a few behaviors for non-bosses: pacing, following(this should be used rarely), raging/charging, and proximity throwing

add new enemies with a length, width, save an image sheet, define frames. that should be all. this concept we use of having excess code in the subclasses is inelegant

[NimbusBP1729]

we should have lots of submissions for passive/type 1 enemies.

[didory123]

@Nicko21 You need to read this issue

[kyleconroy]

@NimbusBP1729 I like this proposal. What are the next step here? I think we should decide on some concrete things to fix in regards to this.

[NimbusBP1729]

In a perfect world we could consider reverting back our current enemies and see what they have in common.

We could create a set of behaviors, possibly in a separate class. Some of these behaviors could be pacing, following, and throwing. The enemy class could manage an enemy based on which of the behaviors it possesses. This would help us to have a variety of enemies without repeating code.

[kyleconroy]

I'm actually not a huge fan of general enemies. I think each enemy should behave differently. We can have modes shared between enemies (such as follow, rage, etc), but each enemy should be different.

[kyleconroy]

The further elaborate, think of the original Sonic. I can think of a bunch of enemies, and they are all different.

• Fish that jump up from the lake
• Crabs that scuttle side to side, stop and throw fiery balls, and continue on
• Missile Chameleons that appear and then rocket towards you
• Bees that fly in, shoot a missile, and then leave
• etc

While they may share some similarities, they are all distinct.

[bucketh3ad]

I agree with @kyleconroy that we should have enemies that behave noticeably differently from one another to the point where they don't feel like fighting two versions of the same thing. However, as @NimbusBP1729 noted, most of the behaviors that we want out of enemies are going to be some variation on a similar theme.

Is there any way we could generalize that functionality enough that we could avoid repeating ourselves for every enemy but keep it versatile enough to enable a multitude of substantially different behavior?

[kyleconroy]

This discussion died off, so I'm closing the issue. If someone wants to open a pull request with more interesting enemies, please do.