Really glad to be working on some new enemy types after wading through what seemed like an endless sludge of audio design and bugfixes! Feels like I’m finally making proper progress again.
I’m calling this enemy the ‘bomber’ – very much inspired by its namesake in Defender of course. I started by designing an enemy that was visually similar to the Defender bomber, a kind of robotic cube thing, but just couldn’t get anywhere with this. It seemed too devoid of personality compared to the other enemies in the game. I then tried designing a more humanoid robot with a jetpack but couldn’t get this to work within the restricted colour palette and resolution either. A fairly frustrating start.
Eventually I thought I’d try something with wings, I was originally thinking of a cross between a robot and a WW2 bomber, kind of like the planes in 1942, but as I started drawing it morphed into this sort of robotic angel which I liked – it reminds me of Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel Of The North‘. Added some particles too of course!
I wanted to keep the AI as simple as possible so settled on a simple algorithm that moves in alternate horizontal and vertical bursts towards the player. If contact is made with a building the sprite moves upwards until it is above the level of the building, thus freeing it to move left and right.
Surprisingly this straightforward algorithm worked OK, I was afraid the enemy would get stuck in endless loops against buildings if the player remained stationary and it did – but this was easily resolved by adding some randomness to the amount of movement in each ‘burst’.
The bomber drops bombs in its stationary phase between each burst of movement. The bombs are actually more like mines in that they float in the same place rather than fall to the floor – I added a small amount of oscillation to make the floating more interesting and a ‘warning’ vibration before the bomb detonates.
And that was pretty much it – there’s a few more subtle things going on like the damage inflicted by a bomb being proportional to how far the player is away from it but I won’t bore you with too many details. Now on to the next enemy…
Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 56.5 days
Probably The Final Bomber Animation
Planting Bombs – Still Looking A Bit Static
Making The Bombs Interact With The Player
The Final Enemy In Action
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