[Gameplay] Revisit the enemies

[ribbybibby]

I'm still not happy with the Enemy AI and behaviour. The Troll and Woodsman are essentially the same enemy with some tweaked rules. I'd like to look at differentiating them more and making them more challenging.

[LMitch83]

I'll go look at the original rules and have a think about this; shall report back here.

[ribbybibby]

A few thoughts I've had on this subject.

I think the larger, scrolling levels that we've transitioned to make the spawns less useful as a mechanic:

• Spawn points of this kind suit fixed area type levels or require enemies that are very clever about navigating the environment. As it is, BBW and LRRH can skip past any spawn point before enough enemies can be produced and the enemies aren't smart enough to follow them
• Upping the spawn rates to combat this just clutters the levels because the enemies aren't clever enough to account for each other and just charge in unison according to their programming.

The enemy AI was mostly written over the course of a weekend and its complexity reflects this. If we do want to stick with spawn points, I think we definitely have to work on making them smarter, ie:

• Make them recognise each other's presence and alter their behaviour slightly dependent on this (stop too much clumping, waving and hording)
• Make it so they are able to ascend as well as descend so every enemy type is capable of chasing the players down (currently it is easier to just shrug them off or leave them behind)
• Have them react to the positioning of the players: backoff to give their attacks room, retreat, keep their distance etc

Or, we could do away with spawns, lower the frequency of the enemies, but make them harder and give them more recognisable patterns of attack.

• Rogue legacy, Metroid, Castlevania, Spelunky - games like these share some similar elements with our game but use enemies in a different way
• Enemies tend to block advancement or make advancing forward very tough
• Enemies have predictable, or discoverable, patterns of attack that the player must master
• Enemies are placed purposely in the environment, rather than spawned over time, and work in tandem with the level design and other enemies to provide challenges to advancement

Also, relatedly, but separately, I don't think BBW's huff attack works in a world of melee enemies.

• A ranged attack with the power of BBW's huff is far too powerful, given that all the enemies need to be quite close to him to attack. This doesn't help the threat posed by the enemies.

As a little tester for all of these ideas, I've created an enemy type based on the woodcutter but with some more rules. When the enemy tweaks to BBW, it will back off to a safe distance before charging forward at BBW. If the enemy ever crosses paths with BBW, 25% damage is done to BBW. BBW's general strategy is to maintain distance from the enemy, anticipate the charge and damage him while he's recouping.

A fairly common enemy type, but one that demonstrates a few things we can reuse and repurpose:

1. Accounting for BBW and adjusting its positioning accordingly
2. Attacking smartly based on BBW, itself and a timer
3. The enemy has a clear pattern of behaviour that lends itself to a particular strategy to overcome

You can check out the test build here. If you kill the enemy, or either char dies, I think you'll have to refresh your browser.

Apologies for the essay, look forward to hearing your thoughts. I'm not set on any of this, so bring on the disagreement! :smile_cat:

[ChildOfTheCron]

Hey Rob1 :D This is all great stuff, I spoke with Laura last night and I'm sure she has some input on this so please hold off on implementing this in our non-test levels until we see what she has to say. But I understand where you're coming from, for the most part. When play testing I rarely have to kill anything as I can just juke the enemy all the way till I reach the end. I'm all for improving the AI now that we have time to do so.

Once we hear from Laura I'll use this bug to update our GDD wiki which I'm putting together (Omg I am becoming Ed aren't I? :( )

Regarding BBW's Huff attack: Point Un: One thing about this I'd like to mention. I think this attack works pretty well for enemies that are tricky to hit with his other attacks. For example there were many times when the only way I could kill a witch was when jump/huffing. The same goes for the cat, as they are small and super fast. Cat enemies also have a 'feature' that is caused because of their movement use physics, I think. Sometimes they will move super, super fast when landing. Like crazy fast. This bug doesn't happen often, is pretty funny and adds to gameplay so I kinda left it as is :D

Point Duex: As the AI for the witch is to go after LRRH like a bat out of hell, I sometimes found myself using the wolf to keep the melee enemies off LRRH. Only to find that a witch flew in from above throwing down cats like hellfire. Being able to quickly huff in LRRH's direction while still fighting back waves of melee enemies makes keeping LRRH alive a bit easier. This is especially true, I feel when taking into account that BBW isn't very mobile.

This new charge mechanic you put in however, works really well! I like how it adds a layer of micro management to the wolf. Something that poses a threat to him, rather than just another enemy to get out of the way. Nice job man, well coded :)

[LMitch83]

Had a look at the test build - I like the pause and charge behaviour; gives the player time to think, but also provides a real 'oh shit' moment when you know something is going to happen.

One of the things I've been thinking about us whether/how much we may want to expand the original gameplay ideas - I designed the initial ideas to take into account the fact we only had 72 hours to implement it. I'll do a more thorough post on it this weekend, but key to this discussion is that I thought we should have more enemy types and a boss fight at the end of each world.

Basically, if we have more enemy types, we can have more ranged attackers - which would make the huff attack more crucial. I would like to keep it in this case, as it gives the player a bit of breathing space if they need it.

Other options are to: Add a longer cool down period to the huff attack, so players can only use it every ten seconds. Nerf it so it does far less damage. Make it a stun only attack, giving the player a few seconds to deliver damage before the enemy moves again.

To spawn or not to spawn? From a non-technical view, it makes no odds to me, but I think it would be worth us examining what we want the core gameplay to be. Do we want players to be forced to clear an area of enemies before they can continue, or should they be able to skip past enemies via platforms if they choose? Essentially, do we want this to be Metroid or Streets of Rage? :).

This decision would alter any further design, so I'd like clarification on this point. I think I'd be happy to allow players to skip (most) enemies if they want, but ensure that would make life harder for them.

Troll vs Woodcutter A quick thought, but we could make the Troll enemy one that actively blocks the player's progress through the level by placing him at the only access point to the next platform up. He could be stronger, but more static.

I also thought he could only be stunned by BBW's attacks and LRRH could lure the Witch to hurl her projectiles (which would hurt the Troll), but that smacks of boss behaviour :).

[ChildOfTheCron]

Ok I undumbed myself. I've been having one of those days where I can't concentrate on the same thing for longer than 4 seconds.

It seems we are all trying to accomplish the same things. We all want to improve on the stuff we set in place in the 72 hours, which is great. :D

Spawns I feel we should keep the spawns and improve on the AI. The reason being replayability. I feel if each level is predetermined that replaying levels would get stale. Because players knew where each enemy is placed. Also, I feel that having some randomness in enemy spawning could lead to interesting gameplay depending on the combination of enemies present at the time. Especially if we make them smarter.

New camera stuff I agree that the spawns, if we keep them, will need to be changed. We would need to cull the enemies if I understand it correctly. It would impact performance (not to mention audio) if the players were high up into the level and the bottom of the level had a million bad guys.

This should be easy enough if we just kill the enemies and spawns when they are off camera for x seconds?

Fight vs flight We should have interesting combat mechanics, but I don't think this should be the main focus in terms of progression. LRRH cannot attack at all. So if the game is all about fighting we pretty much just have one player acting as a side-kick - not fun at all.

The focus should remain in the co-op level traversing. Enemies should be a factor but not the focus I feel :)

Improvements Rob1 I'm perfectly happy for you to improve upon the AI behaviour you already created, as you have been doing. Once Laura thinks up some clever designs for new enemies/attacks/behaviour suggestions we can look at incorperating them as well.

We could change the huff n puff to a stun and see how it plays out? It makes sense game play wise - wind stunning rather than damaging.

[ribbybibby]

I've improved the charging character somewhat and committed it in b2bb674df6c8a153dcf5101875d3112d85e2b358. You can find it in the MovingPlatform test level. I'll have a proper read through all the comments here after dinner and respond :).

[LMitch83]

FYI - In lieu of anywhere meaningful to upload it, I added a whole bunch of stuff concerning potential new (and existing) enemies, bosses and level elements on the wiki.

[LMitch83]

Wondered if I could pick everyone's brains. In order to telegraph the first boss fight, I was considering changing the Troll's damage condition to be only his head takes damage (requiring LRRH to help BBW jump to attack; combining this with using the cat projectiles of the witch seems too much). I would move the cat projectile damage behaviour to an enemy in world three (beanstalk) and possibly to the boss (that I haven't quite figured out yet).

Thoughts?