The BitBull Blog

Another new enemy in the bag – this one’s called the ‘mother’! At least that’s what I’m referring to it as now anyway.

As with the previous enemy it’s heavily inspired by one of the enemies from the original Defender, in this case the ‘pod’. The main ‘selling point’ of the pod is that when it’s destroyed it releases a bunch of smaller, faster enemies called ‘swarmers’ that use kamikaze tactics to attack the player.

The ‘mother’ works in pretty much the same way. As I’m going for a more ‘character’ based approach to most of my enemies I thought it would be nice to have the original enemy split in to smaller ‘mini me’ versions of itself when destroyed – a kind of mother/child thing.

For the design of the enemy I went for a kind of insectoid ‘space invader’ type approach. It’s consistent with the design of the ‘mutant’ enemy and also I knew I could get this to work at a very small size for the ‘children’. Strangely the hardest thing to get right here was the eyes which I wanted to look like a cross between real eyes and some kind of electronic ‘scanner’ – as though the eyes are on an LED screen or something with a lot of interference.

I’ve made the ‘mother’ probably a bit more dangerous in its original incarnation than the Defender ‘pod’. The AI tracks the player in ‘bursts’ similar to the ‘bomber’ enemy but not restricted to either purely horizontal or vertical movement. It uses a similar simple technique to avoid getting stuck in between buildings as well, ie when it collides with a building it will move upwards until above the level of the building. It also fires slow-moving bullets.

The ‘children’ were basically an extension of the ‘mother’ class with different motion parameters so, thankfully, it didn’t take long to get these up and running at all. I added particle effects to both, a kind of anti-gravity field or something. Note how these get disturbed when the enemy collides with a building or takes damage!

I spent quite a while tweaking the motion parameters of both mother and children, both to get them to feel right in relation to each other and also to get the children to feel like they were moving in a ‘swarm’ without working too obviously in unison. The actual ‘birth’ sequence to a while to get right as well, it needs to be slow enough to see what’s going on yet fast enough to feel like the children are being propelled out as speed. I also added some particles to the birth sequence to give is some more ‘pazazz’. Needs audio too..

Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 58.5 days

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