DevLog 3: enemies

Devlog 3: Enemies

This week in the production of Tumbleweed Troubles I worked on the enemies and how they interact with the player. This includes various enemy types which have differing traits and strengths.

I created a spawner which allows me to add as many different enemy types as I want and modify the probability of them being spawned. This will allow me to play around with the likelihood of each enemy type to find the optimal gameplay experience and modify the difficulty until I find what I think works best.

The enemies which are in the array include; tumbleweeds which have been shown in previous devlogs, however there are now two types of movement, one with a pursue feature which chases down the player, wherever they are on the map along with a wandering one who patrols the desert in hope of coming in contact with the player. In the future this may be modified to make the wanderer start pursuing when it is within a certain distance of the player. I will need to test the game over the coming week to see if this is necessary. There will also be a Mega Tumbleweed "boss" which will be spawned at timed intervals alternating with the boss cactus which will be discussed later. This boss tumbleweed will have a variety of movements including a combination of wandering/patrolling a certain area along with potentially spawning smaller tumbleweeds to add to the battle.

The boss cactus is the purple dancing one from the previous devlog which will be static but will also spawn moving tumbleweeds, both of the boss varieties will have health bars added to them with a much larger amount of health than their regular inferior counterparts; this will be shown via a health bar which will be added in the future while doing the UI for the game.  The lighter enemies in the cactus camp are smaller green cacti which are also static and do the same amount of damage as the small tumbleweeds.

The enemies also have different health levels depending on how strong they are, each bullet does 1 damage. The smaller enemies take 2 shots to kill, while the bosses take 10 at the moment but this may be increased in the future depending on how the game feel is later on in development.

 Another small thing that has been changed during the last week has been the collider on the player. This has been moved to just cover the legs and shadow to make the movement around obstacles and interaction with enemies and the map seem more natural. This was done from feedback that was supplied after the last iteration and it works extremely well as it has made the movement feel a lot more fluent and realistic.

 Peer review feedback:

When shown to other students this week the feedback recieved was that the enemies can collide multiple times with the player rapidly meaning that instead of the amount of damage that should be taken e.g 1 can be more in the reals of 4 or 5. I tried to fix this however have not yet found a solution as i did not want to spend too much time on it when there was other more important parts of the game to get in. I will get back to this and fix it, most likely by making there be a cooloff time between collisions with the same enemy. Another bit of feedback i recieeved was that the enemies all spawn in a bit of a cluster, this however was a relatively easy fix as i made the spawn area larger and made so they cannot spawn right next to another enemy. 

What was hard:

This week was quite a gruelling one in terms of coding troubleshooting as I still am no where near fluent in C#, this makes some of the tasks take much longer than they should but definitely makes for a sweet reward when it starts working as i intended.

All enemies were created by me on pixilart.com as referenced in the last devlog. The pursuing and wandering scripts were taken from a previous pracs in KIT 109. The spawner script was a modification of  the one from practicals to change probability of spawning far easier and change so the enemies don't spawn too close to eachother.