Enemies

enemies are a very core feature of my game, nearly all interaction with the game comes through enemies.

In my planning, I have categorized enemies into two different types: Bosses and minions.

Bosses (or just boss if I don't have enough time to create more than one.) are the main enemies of the game, with large health bars and an array of different attacks that they use to fight the player. They have more complicated attack patterns and typically have ways that the player can exploit to their advantage. They also have different phases in which they change depending on the difficulty and how much health they have left.

Minions are the enemies that the bosses will create during the fights. They typically have a very small amount of health, typically taking a very short time to kill. They have very simple, repetitive attack patterns that the player can learn. They are designed to complement boss attacks to add pressure onto the player.

So far the game has one boss and one minion:

Threat Containment Unit (TCU)

The TCU is a large, somewhat humanoid-shaped robot that employs a variety of different attacks in order to overwhelm and destroy its target. It is the first (and at the time of writing, only) boss you will face.

The boss attacks in set patterns, with very little randomness to its attack, realistically if the player pays attention they may be able to what attack is coming up next judging by the attacks that come before. For example, in the boss's 4th attack in its attack pattern, it raises its left (right on the screen) hand. the player may prepare for this, making sure no drones are alive so the player can freely attack the hands.

The boss can only be damaged in one place, its eye. I'm still working on finding a way to naturally convey this to the player without needing to explicitly tell this to the player.

Periodically, the boss spawns 2 drones, one on each side of the arena as well as spawning an additional one on a random side on medium/hard difficulties. Read below for more information about what the drones actually do.

TCU's most common attack is the missile attack, where it will launch 3 (easy), 4 (medium), or 5 (hard) missiles onto the arena in set places which allows for each missile to cover roughly 1/6 of the arena, meaning on hard difficulty it leaves roughly 1/6 of the arena free of missiles. After a brief time, the missiles explode if not destroyed.

Every few attacks, the TCU raises one of his hands which are clamped down onto the arena. This exposes a weakpoint at which the player has a brief amount of time. If the player fails to destroy this weakpoint, the boss damages a very large portion of the arena. Although Destroying both hands puts the boss into a weakened state which allows the player to deal triple damage.

An attack that isn't implemented yet is the chest beam attack where the boss's chest opens to reveal a core that fires a powerful laser beam straight down the middle of the arena. It deals tremendous damage compared to most other attacks and continues to deal damage as the player stays in it. I plan to have it do attack in two different ways, One where it stays firing into the centre of the arena, and one where it sweeps to a side of the arena from the centre, telegraphed in some way.

Drones

Drones are spawned by the boss, they are designed to be a relatively minor nuisance on easy and medium difficulties but can pose an immediate threat on hard. They player can choose to destroy the by firing a few shots at them.

The drones slowly move up and down on whichever side of the screen they spawn on, at a slow speed.

The drones shoot out slow projectiles every few seconds in bursts of 1 on easy, or 3 on medium and hard difficulty. On hard the projectiles move significantly faster.

Missiles

While not necessarily an enemy, they share some scripts with the actual enemies, mostly revolving around the way the game handles enemy health as they can be destroyed much like the drones. They have changed slightly during development, such as being given a mostly unnoticeable animation and more consistent landing areas.

End Notes

Unfortunately, I did not get a whole lot done this week as I have been extremely busy with other university work (the C programming language is not fun!) And most of what I did get done was refining things in the background. Enemies have been present in the game for a the last two week techinically so it was mainly covering stuff I had already covered. Cheers for reading!