The BitBull Blog

Been working on some new jetboarding enemies over the past few days, so around a day of pixel-pushing and a day of coding with the extra half day fixing bugs caused by the new ‘world wrap’ technique I described in my previous post. I’ve also been rejigging my sprite sheets so the art used for the jetboard and weapon attachments is duplicated on the enemy sprite sheet (fewer spritebatch calls to the GPU needed and should also make things easier if/when I add alternate colour palettes).

Fortunately new jetboarding enemies are relatively simple from a code point of view as a much of their ‘personality’ is defined by tweaking parameters already present in the AI. I also have a fairly decent template for doing the animations now too. Here are the new enemies that have been added, names are just codenames really so may well change…

1. The Master Minion
This is really just a bigger, stronger, and slightly more dangerous version of the omnipresent ‘minion’, the game’s cannon fodder. They’re quicker to snatch your babies away and mutate too!

2. The Ninja
Small, fast, light, very aggressive, but also pretty weak. This guy is very dangerous and performs a ‘pincer movement’ around the player really frequently making him a tough opponent to deal with.

3. The Aggressor
This guy is strong, fairly nimble, and very aggressive when you rile him but he’s actually pretty dumb and will let you sneak up behind him and get in the first shot. A bit like some of the knights in ‘Dark Souls’ (well, kind of)! You can tell which way he’s facing by looking at the scanner. This enemy required some custom AI work.

4. The Thug
This guy is very big and strong and takes a lot of ammo to dispatch. He’s pretty slow though, and not the brightest lamp on alien street either. I was particularly pleased with how the art for this one worked out.

5. The Snatcher
All this guy cares about is stealing your babies and trying to mutate. It’s like he’s a kind of half-mutant already and is desperate to finish the job. He’s a bit of a coward and will actively try and avoid the player unless directly engaged – watch him though, as he’ll snatch away your progeny and mutate really quickly if you don’t keep an eye on the scanner! This enemy required the most custom AI work.

This brings the total of enemy types to 12, I think I’m going to try and bring it closer to 20 and want to add some ‘miniboss’ type enemies with much larger sprites. few more smaller ones to do yet though…

Dev Time: 2.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 156 days

previous | next