[Game Dev] More New Enemies

I've started using Codecks to plan my project. It's a bit like Trello, except it's much easier to organize since it's modeled off of a deck of playing cards instead of a list of info. It's going to be a bit more organic than my Trello Board, and I'll casually add new cards as I see fit so that it's more like a checklist or notepad for stuff that I'm actively working on or planning to soon.

You can see what's been done, what's currently being worked on, what's in my "hand," etc.

If you'd like to keep up with that, you may do so here: https://open.codecks.io/cv_beaumont 

Skeleton Biker

One of the newest enemies I've added is the Skeleton Biker -- inspired by the man, the myth, and legend from Castlevania 64. He operates similar to the previous zombies, moving across the screen in a straight line, albeit much faster, and has a greater ability to turn back around. He has a higher HP value and won't be staggered by attacks, so despite his simplicity, he will require a slightly different strategy from previous monsters.

It's taken a while to make him feel just right; between different health and speed values. Due to the player's long whip, he needed to take more than one hit in order to be an actual threat. If the player could defeat him in one strike, there would be no reason to jump over him, and thus you'd never have to see him turn around to chase you down. 

He's still not too hard, but now requires the player use their timing & platforming skills, or even their sub-weapons, especially if he's sharing the screen with other enemies. Of course, a well timed jump attack could kill him in one strike! Careful though, because if you jump too early or too late, you might get hit by the motorcycle before you can jump over! As to why this quirk exists...

This guy has a rather irregular collision setup, which took me a while because the standard collision rectangle was not well suited to it. 

If I tried fitting both the motorcycle & skeleton within the collision mask, there would be a bunch of empty space around the two that would actually hurt the player - making it much harder to jump over the biker entirely. With how fast they moved, that was no good!

Instead, the enemy is actually comprised of TWO separate enemy objects. The Biker's actual collision mask only covers the motorcycle, but the object will create a second invisible enemy with its own collision box, and that object is constantly following the skeleton around. When one of the objects takes damage, the other object's HP will match it. 

So, if a player makes a well-timed jump attack, they'll hit the invisible enemy and then the motorcycle after. While not originally intended, I do quite like it.

Anyway, I still need to finish the animations. There are some lazy, place-holder sprites here.

Extra Enemies

While testing the Bikers with other enemies, I quickly created two more types of enemies - though they're not yet finished and still use copyrighted art assets. The Hand & Fly (Dropper) both use different heights from the player, encouraging more diverse spatial navigation.

The Hands sit close to the ground, present in Simon's Quest and Super Castlevania 4. Each game implements them differently, but right now, mine resemble their SC4 counterpart. They will grab and prevent players from moving until they break free, but otherwise do no damage. I'm not happy with the current implementation of this design because it's inconsistent and the player has to mash the joystick for a short period of time to escape, which may be physically uncomfortable for some players.

The Fly is much better. They move across the screen and drop a fireball when above players. This means players will always need to be mindful when dealing with other enemies... Or just toss an axe overhead. Since the player carries 2 sub-weapons (unlike Castlevania), this does disrupt the balance of such an encounter... Players might always carry the axe with them if there's never a reason to carry something else in that slot.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'd like to get back to working on it, so expect some silence. I wish there were more ways I could make the experience of waiting for game development updates more interesting...

Don't forget to eat & sleep.