The BitBull Blog

In order to test the gameplay for Jetboard Joust I needed to start to thinking properly about how enemies are going to appear. Originally I was imagining that all enemies would spawn at the start of each level, however a few initial tests have led me to realise that that approach won’t work for two reasons 1) The player is too likely to become overwhelmed at the start of the level and 2) The difficulty of the level would tail off too much as enemies are destroyed.

So – in order for levels not to feel too ‘front-loaded’ I’m going to have enemies spawn in batches after a certain amount of time has elapsed, much like in Defender.

I also needed to think about the logic behind the choice of enemies in each level. As there will be an infinite number of levels in the game they will have to be procedurally generated somehow – my ideal scenario is to allocate a difficulty score for a level and have an algorithm allocate a spread of enemies that matches it without feeling too ‘random’.

The problem is complicated by the fact that many enemies are a combination of two factors, enemy type and weapon type – so allocating a simple difficulty score per enemy type won’t wash.

The solution I’ve come up with so far (which may well change) is as follows…

I have three separate enums WeaponTypes, EnemyRiderTypes and EnemyTypes. The two different enemy types represent ‘armed’ jetboard riding enemies and ‘standard’ enemies. The values allocated to each element in the enum represent a difficulty score, e.g…

I then have a new class EnemyDefinition which represents an enemy to which a difficulty score can be allocated. This could be either a standard EnemyType or a combination of an EnemyRiderType and WeaponType. EnemyDefinition also has a method EnemyDefinition.Create() that creates an instance of the enemy it defines.

At startup I automatically create a list of EnemyDefinitions which contains an entry for each EnemyType and for each possible EnemyRiderType/WeaponType combination – I store this in a static class EnemyRandomizer.

Now I have a static method EnemyRandomizer.CreateBatch() which takes a parameter for a total difficulty score and a parameter for the current level. This method creates a list of all EnemyDefinitions that are equal or less than the supplied difficulty score and chooses one of these at random. It then calls EnemyDefinition.Create() as many times as necessary to create enemies that total the supplied difficulty score and returns this ‘batch’ in a list.

When I originate a level I take a difficulty score based on the level number, split this into a series of ‘batch’ scores and then call EnemyRandomizer.CreateBatch() for each one – so a level with a difficulty score of 500 might have five separate batches with a difficulty score of 100 each. These ‘batches’ spawn at a preset time interval or when all existing enemies have been destroyed.

There’s a few extra complications such as making sure we don’t get ‘stray’ enemies and stuff but this is the basic approach and (for now) it seems to work OK. Hopefully it’ll prove robust enough to be used for the final game.

Dev Time: 0.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 33 days

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