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Core Enemy Design

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Enemy development happened very quickly due to asset requirements from ourselves and our publisher, which meant that liberties had to be taken on behaviour complexity (~2-3 days per 4-5 characters). Therefore the core design of an enemy had to be broken down into a simple set of features:

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  • Simple movement

    • Grounded or Flying​

    • Chase Target or Reposition

    • Can use Nav-link traversal?

  • Single Attacks​

    • Telegraphing​

    • Status Effects (Freeze, Burn, Poison)

  • Standout Feature​

    • This can be tied to the attack, movement or something else entirely

    • I.e. Impenetrable Shield, Lingering Flames, Bouncing Projectile

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This allowed me to create sets of enemies that offer different behaviours, and then in turn let Level Design create areas with specific challenges for players.

The roster of basic enemies I ended up designing and shipping consisted of:

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  • Desert Biome

    • Bilgebor (AoE Poison)​

    • Scorpion Worm (Static Ambusher)

  • Robot Biome​

    • Husk (Enemy Spawner)​

    • Crawling Drone (Melee)

    • Attack Drone (Ranged)

    • Support Drone (Shield Ally)

  • Temple Biome​

    • Hallowed Sentinel (Shielded Smasher)​

    • Blazing Devotee (AoE Fire)

    • Warden of The Forgotten (Bouncing Stun Projectile)

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Other enemies were designed and worked on but didn't make the cut due to time and complexity.

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Loot Goblin

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I also designed and pitched a character to change up the common behaviour of our enemies. The Loot Goblin is a concept similar to those seen in other games (i.e. Pack Rat in Vermintide 2, or Treasure Goblin in Diablo), but the main idea for Storm Lancers was to lead the player into challenge and loot areas off the golden path.​

IMG_Enemy_AttackDrone_edited.png
SH_LootGoblin.png

​​​​Hitting the Goblin will drop coins each time, with the final kill offering coins and wisps. Originally would also drop items but ultimately clashed too much with the simple player progression flow in place already.

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Boss Fight Design

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At the end of multiple stages the player encounters a boss character, this begins a multi-stage fight different to the other NPCs. This gave me the opportunity to add some more complexity into the gameplay, but I had to temper that against the time constaints.​

There are 3 boss fights in the released game:

  1. Starbear - 2 different movement phases, grounded, heavy concussive impacts, mortar-like poison projectile, dodge-able charging attack

  2. Goliath - teleportation, player movement-heavy, ranged attacks, arena-sectioning attacks

  3. Captain Kaz - portal usage for ranged projectiles, biome-swapping ability, mob NPC spawns, arena-sectioning attacks

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Where the Goliath already existed before I took over and required tweaking, it was my task to design the boss enemy and fight flow, as well as the arena design. With this in mind I built a simple set of rules for what they can do:

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  • Multiple phases tied to boss health value

  • Escalation of difficulty through each phase

  • Movement and camera locked to an arena space within screen bounds

  • Can break the one-attack rule that other enemies have

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This then gave enough variance from other enemies to let me separate these as "bosses", but kept the scope reasonable to reuse our existing systems while requiring minor additions.

In the above you can see my design sketches for different attack and ability concepts for the final boss fight. This character went through a few iterations, beginning with a simple upgrade of the original Goliath design, to a true final battle feeling experience. This required some additional behaviour on top of the upgrades, such as the "Reality Shift" level layout change that spawns biome-specific enemies, or the "Dimensional Shield" that randomises its shape.

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