Enemy Movement Design
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In this post I would like to talk about the movement design of our bird enemy. The bird enemy is the first and the weakest that a player counters. It flies in a covey and moves slow compared to the other enemies. It shoots projectiles when afar, and does an electric attack when closeby. The enemy has different spawn points at the right side of the screen, flying towards the player avatar on the left. It uses all the game field as its movement place. First thing we thought of when designing the movement was that it should glide in air instead of flapping wings, because a pack of birds flapping at the same time might distract the player from the stronger enemies. It was designed so that the pack flies around in a row, moving in arcs, like other organic creatures. The arc movement pattern changes depending on where the player avatar is. The first bird will always follow the ship, whether it is at up or down or at the front or back, and the rest of the covey will follow it. After the birds reach close enough, they start circling around the ship in a row. Enemy flying in a row also makes each one’s attacks more visible, and gives player more clear vision. The circular movement was designed so that not all the time they will circle around the player clockwise for example, depending on where the arc was distrupted, they can circle counter clockwise too. This circular movement around the player was inspired by the bird of preys in nature, which gave more realistic and aesthetic feeling to the movement.
Only downside of this movement pattern was that it took a lot longer time then expected to develop this movement for our programmers, and overall slowed us down a bit. But I still think this was a worthy investment. Among all the things we have done so far, it is one of the things we are most proud of. And in the future this movement pattern can be implemented (up to certain extend) to other enemies as well.  |
