The Story of Getting Enemies In and Working news

It was tough getting here. We started with little balls of color to represent enemies. Remember that? Things were much simpler then. He could walk back and forth, jump over objects, and even kill the player and be killed by the player! Woo!

Also, he was very very scary.

We moved on from there, but very slowly. Our enemy model wasn't ready for months after, and Murilo probably tore out a lot of hair trying to get the animations into the state of perfection at which they ended.

But we couldn't really use it yet. Not properly anyway. I took some Unity shortcuts that would allow us to at least imagine the model was being used properly, though. Using the walk animation as the idle, I was able to slap the new enemy model over the old balls and let em loose. Still, it meant no galloping and, even worse, no turning around. Which gave us very ridiculous moments like this one:

This enemy is the King of Pop.

Things got worse before they got better. Pretty soon, a weird bug had arisen that turned all of our enemies on their sides! Or, in the case of these guys, on their butts. I wrote lightheartedly about it here, but this was actually a pretty devastating development. I knew when it occurred that, on top of just generally being a huge headache, it would also mean having to redo all of the enemy paths, jumps, and placements throughout all of the finished levels. Ouch.

The solution, of course, turned out to be something fairly simple, but the entire event underlined some general problems with the enemy itself. Luckily, Mihai is just about the hardest worker on Earth, and he set himself to the task of properly rectifying things. There were some missteps and some disappointments along the way, but in what turned out to be no time at all, things were once again as they should be.

The sounds of the enemy can help to make moments like this one incredibly tense.

Now the enemy's are slowly being put back into the level, and with them the moving platforms and flying enemy's that experienced a lot of the same issues.

The goal now is to have the demo ready by the end of the week- Sunday night. After that, we'll be begging a few very very generous people to help us test the sucker out by looking for bugs and hopefully telling us what works and what doesn't. If you're a constant reader here, you'll have heard me say this (or something like it) a thousand times already- it's hard to see things clearly when you're really really close to them. To my mind, it's one of game design's biggest challenge.

Also, random shoutout, but I'd like to get the word out about an indie game that's been in demo stage for a long long time now- Life Goes On. The trailer is seriously magical.

Also, as always, don't forget to RT FOLLOW LIKE SHARE +1 AND KISS US.

Thanks as always!