Devlog 2: The New Enemy

The Phantom Menace

On our last blog entry we went through multiple stuff that could spur the player to move faster, harder, scooter and we ended up with one concept that sucked least – the Wall of Death (WoD). It still sucked, however, we tried to think of a different solution – some sort of other enemy… And that’s exactly what we did – an actual enemy. I know, right?!

A couple of removed code lines later the WoD was removed and replaced with a copy of the player prefab that could fly around and teleport itself to player from time to time. This fixed previous issues:

Enemy can change its teleportation distance to match player skills – the player should have no problem getting used to the game
Enemy can move from side to side – the player should be able to normally move around those curvy turns
Enemy can always remain below player – the player will be kept busy and what’s more important – stressed

And to allow the player to recover from the enemy catching up, the enemy does not deal damage instantly – there is some time limit while he charges up his attack.

Notice how the enemy slowly becomes red while charging up his attack

The enemy movement is done via an invisible dot that follows the player around. The dot is used by the enemy to teleport at some distance around it.

Return of the Dot

So after meticulous testing process we are thinking, whether or not the development of the enemy is finally complete… annnnd it’s not. There’s still one big problem: as the enemy teleports from one point to another, you as a player don’t really know where he will appear next – above, to the side or below. This creates that feeling that you can’t really outrun him – the red bastard just always seems to be cheating, when appearing above you. We wanted for the player to be stressed – we got that, now we want him to feel at ease if he’s doing really well.

The solution struck us as we were debugging enemy movement – looking at the moving red dot and running from it was much more fun and interesting than from teleporting enemy. Moving the enemy to the dot…

… and done!

Now the enemy changes his behavior depending on player’s skill, supplies plenty of stressful situations and what’s more important – makes YOU WANNA RUN FASTER!