How we do enemies

As a small studio with an art team in the single digits, every member of our team does many things. We select for specific skills but also for their ability to adapt to whatever is needed for the project at each moment. When we began building our studio in 2023, with just two artists, we didn't have any sort of process in place and had never worked with artists before, so as we prioritized delivering we slowly started to create some processes as we needed them. 

Fast forward until now, and we have a workflow that we're mostly happy with, although it still needs some refinement, which we're going to discuss a bit below.

The process for creating a new enemy or platform starts with game design writing down ideas of mechanics for a Proof of Concept. These are guided by a general idea of the theme of the biome in which these elements will first appear, and by the skillset that Kenzu will have when he encounters them.

After the PoC is tested and deemed fun, the dev team codes the final version of the enemy and the Art team starts working on a concept for it.

The biome we're currently working on is the Forest, in which Kenzu starts out with the skills of Shuriken (a throwable weapon), Slash, Slash combo, Parry, Wall jump and heal. By the end of this biome he will also obtain the Kunai, which will allow him to cling to enemies or special platforms.

So for the enemy and platform concepts, of course, we went with organic shapes and palettes, that remind of wood, stone, and a hint of something toxic, because this forest has been contaminated by... something.

This enemy, the Turtle, is based on an enemy we had designed for the previous biome but never used, that we call ProTecc. 

This is what he looked like:

Let's see the Design Team's specifications for Pro-Tecc:

Behavior

Does not carelessly chase the player, stays within a zone to his initial spawnpoint.
When the player is close enough, execute shield charge attack.
Shield charge moves him forward, short-mid cooldown, takes 2 seconds to recover. The shield charge stops when if it collides Kenzu.
Shield is not active during the recovery phase of this attack.
Otherwise use a regular melee attack
Shield is not active during the full duration of the attack.

Shield

Has a shield that prevents any kind of attacks from dealing damage or passing through.
The shield does not prevent kenzu movement.
The shield can be temporarily broken:
- With strong slash
- Or the final combo attack
Breaking shield does NOT damage the enemy!
The shield goes up again after (configurable: 3) seconds

The Turtle is is a spin on this concept. The design document says:

It’s like ProTecc but the shield is in the back instead of the front.
Has a shield in the back, can’t be damaged from there, has to be attack from the front, so the player has to bait it’s attack to damage the enemy during recovery/cooldown of the attack. The back shield gets disabled during the attack.
It’s only attack is a strong, slow basic slash, with a big hitbox.

Afther the PoC was coded, tested and approved, the Art team started working on the concepts:

The art team worked based on the definition. As you can see, they provided a varied range of choices, with different weapons in which the Turtle can deal the damage, from slabs of stone to hammers to branches to even (as in Q and R) just very sharp nails. As you can see, the name "Turtle" is not meant to limit the art team to just draw turtles, it's an internal name that we use since the PoC stage, when we don't know how the enemy is going to look.   

The "Attack ideas" at the top were useful to envision whether the design would work in the movement. We had another enemy on this batch (a "Mole" that moves underground and pops out of the ground to jump you)  for which the concepts didn't show how the attack would look and it was something we decided we wanted to have for all future enemy concepts. 

So, back to the Turtle, we chose E. 

- Options L and M reminded us too much of a Blasphemous enemy.

- Option J's backpack was too similar to another enemy we have in our game.

- We preferred the hand placement in E or I above A through D's and F through H's

- N, O and P were a bit more generic.

The artists then did palette tests. What we're aiming to improve for this step of the process is reviewing the concept before doing palette tests so that we test out the colors directly on the chosen version.

Another aspect to improve (which we have done on and off but never as a standardized step in concepting) is using the exact collider shapes and sizes to inform the concept. This will allow for a more seamless concept-to-animation flow.

And that's it for now regarding enemies!

Other updates

We added custom keybinding for keyboard

User SirNicknm's wishes have been granted!

This is how it looks like in the Settings panel until we get a UX revamp

First look at our trailer!

Have you ever seen a videogame trailer in progress? As a first time videogame studio, we hadn't! Until we partnered with the amazing animation studio Bellolandia, who have us buzzing with excitement with every update. We dare to share how it's going so far: