Mean Worm Enemy
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This week I’ve worked on implementing a new enemy type to our game. The original idea was that it would look like a worm, but it ended up looking like a mean snake of some sort with very sharp teeth.
It was already planned early on that we would have more types of enemies in order to bring more variation to the gameplay while exploring. And this one, in particular, was to add a bit of a surprise element to our game. The design was that it would react to a player coming within a certain distance. It would then start digging towards the player, making a rumbling noise in the process. I achieved this by having a variable that would be assigned the moment the player is detected. This variable would contain the current time + a certain delay, which is now assigned as 3.5 seconds. During these short seconds, the enemy would lock onto the player’s position, but not appear just yet. There’s also another experimental variable that makes it so that when there are 1.5 seconds left until it’s been 3.5 seconds, it would stop locking onto the player’s position. This is because the worm is otherwise nearly impossible to dodge and the player would end up dying a lot. Once the current time is equal to or greater than the variable we assigned, it will call a Coroutine function that would make the worm move out from the wall and towards the player’s position 1.5 seconds prior. I use Coroutines for this since it’s perfect for the job. It will basically update the function every frame until all of the actions within it has finished. Thus I can have a while loop that checks the distance between the enemy and its target. Within this loop, there’s a MoveTowards() function that will keep moving towards its target until it has reached it. It will then use the very same method to move back into its original position.
The player in comparison to the worm
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