Blog 2: Designing the enemies in Umibozu
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After picking the concept for Umibozu, the game where the player travels through the fog until they encounter the mysterious entity known as Umibozu which I mentioned in the last blog, we chose to stick mostly to the concept that was chosen. That meant that we wanted to avoid any major changes in the mechanics, level layout and enemies, but there are some things that can’t be left alone and one of those were the enemies.
When designing the enemies we wanted to have enemies that made sense and weren’t fictional so that they would have a greater impact on the player when they are first discovered. We wanted them to not be too strong so that the game would be too hard for the player, since we have to take into account that the fog in the game will leave the player with a low field of view and can not make the enemies to fast to or to punishing or the game would be way to hard for the player.
When I first started designing the enemies we wanted to stick to the ones in the concept. The ones in the concept were a shark, a crab and an octopus / squid. We decided to change one of the enemies, the crab, since I personally didn’t like the idea of a crab that would be at the surface of the water, in my mind that just didn’t make sense. The crab was then changed to two different things, a shrimp and a anglerfish and since we wanted to keep the feeling of the player being in a japanese environment we decided to go with the shrimp instead.
Now that we had decided on which enemies would be featured in the game came the balancing and this process was sort of frustrating. When balancing the enemies I need to make sure to not make them too fast since they are in a fog where the player can not see them, but they can’t be too slow or the game will be too easy. Because of the difficulty of balancing the enemies I decided I would leave it until we had the fog ready to be implemented, since it hasn’t been implemented yet. Once we have the fog implemented the balancing will be a lot more easier since we can see just how everything works together. If we had done the planning a bit better, the game could have been tested much earlier but since the planning wasn’t correctly done, one example being that we prioritized making 3 enemies instead of actually focusing a bit on making one of the most crucial parts / mechanics of the game. Hopefully balancing won’t be too difficult when it comes balancing the game. Most of the problems that arise from this could probably been avoided if I had planned things a lot better or if we as a group did not get caught struggling with our art style. Since we spent so much time on redoing the art we lost a lot of time that could have been used to improve the game rather than redoing the artwork for the game. In the end it all comes down to the planning, prioritization of things and knowing what is acceptable as a finished product.  |
