Chickens, and balancing enemies to make them fun
Hello! It's been another busy couple of weeks, and I've been working on enemies for my new game.
I finished the cats that I talked about in the previous newsletter, I added the chickens (my new favorite enemy!), and I did lots and lots of balancing. The game plays so much better than it did a couple of weeks ago!
There's a video of all the new and rebalanced enemies in action, but I'll post it a bit further down after I've shown off the new enemies.
Cats
The cats that I showed off last time are done! They run around and shoot pairs of fireballs at you, like this:
They're the standard long-range enemy and they're a lot of fun. There's just enough time for you to walk through the gap between the two fireballs that they shoot, so you always have to decide whether you want to wait for both fireballs to fly past or if you need to squeeze between them.
Chickens
The chickens are done too! Here's my favorite animation frame in the whole game:
They're the other main long-range enemy type. They run away and hurl bombs at you, which explode in a 3x3 area shortly after they land. But if you hit a bomb before it explodes, you can use it like a projectile and send it flying towards your enemies!
There's another version of them that throws flame bombs instead, which instantly explode and leave flames on the ground that deal damage to both you and other enemies. Hitting enemies into flames is a strong tactic!
If you leave a chicken alone for too long, it will lay an egg.
This egg will hatch into another chicken, which can lay more eggs, and so on. So even though the chickens are doing their best to run away from you, there are lots of good reasons to chase them down instead of leaving them alone! They're my favorite enemy in the game and I hope you like them too.
Mecha Moles
Mecha moles are like moles, but they throw missiles which explode in a 3x3 square when they hit a wall. Running away from enemies in a circle around the edge of the screen is always pretty powerful in these kinds of games, so it's really interesting to fight against an enemy who makes it dangerous to stand close to walls.
Balance
I've made a bunch of balance changes to the older enemies too. This game is probably going to have traditional difficulty settings (Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard etc) so I'm trying to balance all of the enemies around the Very Hard difficulty setting, and I'll tone them down for the easier modes once I've gotten them all feeling good. Here's a video of how the combat is looking:
I've made lots of changes! The main ones are that most enemies move and attack faster, short range enemies are much more efficient at running closer to you when they're really far away from you, and long range enemies try to aim their shots close to you but have a bit of randomness to their aim so you have to react accordingly.
I want to make the mice spread out and flank you when they're too close to each other, and I want to improve the slime and penguins a bit in general. But aside from that, it's all feeling pretty good!
Once I've finished balancing those last few enemies, I'll finally start making a level that can be played from start to finish. I've spent way too long doing everything in this little demo room and it will be nice to start turning things into a real game.
Life (is going well!)
I don't remember how much I've been complaining about my healthcare issues here or how much of it was confined to my Patreon. But just in case I complained about that stuff here, I should mention that I finally got access to the hormones that I've been trying to get for a long long time!
It's been almost two years since I started talking to doctors about this stuff, and it feels a bit surreal that it finally happened. I'm full of all sorts of emotions (probably due to the hormones...) but I won't ramble on about it here. So I'll just say that I had to spend a huge amount of time trying to get all of this sorted out, and now I'll be able to spend that time making games or hanging out with friends or resting instead. I'm looking forward to it.
Anyway, I'm going to go get some rest. I hope you have a wonderful couple of weeks, and I'll see you next time with another update on the game!