I started out with a plan to create a kind of ‘robot/alien wasp’ type creature called a ‘stinger’ and it was fairly straightforward to knock up a version with placeholder art, splitting the creature into three separate sprites for head, thorax and abdomen that could move independently. Getting the final art right though was an absolute nightmare. I think this was due to a number of reasons…
1. Wasps are very dark, consequently reference photos were very unclear on detail. Also creating a dark sprite that stands out from a dark background with a very limited colour palette is tough.
2. Insects in general are pretty ‘fiddly’ creatures. The things that distinguish their character are actually pretty small and/or spindly which make them very hard to render in low resolution. I found the legs particularly hard and gave up trying to render mandibles as whatever I did they just looked like a beak.
3. One of the things that characterises a wasp is (obviously) the stripes on their abdomen. These are hard to render at low resolution as angled stripes just look too ‘jaggy’ and going for straight stripes just makes the abdomen look like a boiled sweet, too cartoony and not ‘creepy’ enough.
I started off trying to make the sprite look too realistic, relying too much on reference photography. I then went down a complete ‘robot’ path, trying to create a creature partly from sprites that I’d already designed (mainly the ‘upgrade weapon’ icons). This had potential but was too bitty and I felt going full-robot lacked the creepiness I was after (never go full-robot)! Things only really started together when I sketched out a very stylised wasp by hand and went for an approach that was 50% ‘real insect’ and 50% ‘steampunk’. I stuck with very stylised angles where possible and this seemed to work, particularly on the legs which I was having massive problems with (I ended up separating these out as individual sprites). I reckon I was 3.5 days on the art for this alone.
Thankfully coding the movement wasn’t too problematic, AI is very simple but seems to work nicely. The gamma-ray that it fires from its ‘sting’ was a bit of a pain in the arse as I had to redo my original gamma-ray code to cope with being aimed at an angle, this meant I needed to use raycasting for the collisions. Fortunately I could reuse code from the ‘shredder‘ weapon but still, this was non-trivial due to my lack of foresight in the way the original gamma-ray was implemented!
There’s a two-stage attack pattern whereby the player must destroy the creature’s abdomen first. At this point the creature becomes faster, more aggressive, and starts to spit poisonous space-venom! The venom-spitting effect is created with particles.
I still need to add some custom audio and maybe work on the explosions a bit more (these ones don’t seem bit enough and bigger enemies also need bigger bones!) but, for now, this one is finally done. Six bloody days!!!
*** edit *** ….and, I’ve just realised when I grabbed this video that I had immunity on the player for debug purposes (groan). That’s why the enemy’s attacks aren’t doing any damage!! I need a break!
Dev Time: 6 days
Total Dev Time: approx 171 days
Abandoned First Draft – Too ‘Realistic’
Abandoned Second Draft – Too ‘Mechanical’
Third Draft – Still Sucks But Finally Heading In The Right Direction
Almost Final Version – Later I made The Abdomen Pulse
Using Various Weapons To Take Out A Stinger
The BitBull Blog 