Hello Sinners! After over three months of hard work and long hours, I'm happy to present to you an entire overhaul of the enemies and their AI! This was the last major system that was left over from the game's original conception, and it felt like I had hit a wall in terms of making the game the way I wanted it to be. So I had to roll up my sleeves and redo years of code bloat to make this happen. The effects of these changes are huge and impact nearly every system in the game. It also affects the gameplay flow and challenge dramatically, enhancing the overall intensity and adding a new stragegic element to the mix. Here are some of the big picture highlights:
New Enemy Movement
Enemies are much more mobile than before, bringing their capabilities more in line with the player. They can move while attacking, strafe around you, back pedal or run away when they are weakened. Spell caster enemies will actively zone and kite you, running away after taking their shot. Headless enemies add to the chaos, moving and rotating erratically while dishing out a volley of attacks. Rather than relying on the same strategy repeatedly as you could before, you really have to use your entire toolkit to prevail, keeping the gameplay engaging and exciting.
New Enemy Attacks
Over 90% of animations have been replaced with new ones. Now attacks are a bit slower and easier to read. And the attack warning UI is a reliable way to time your parries or get out of harm's way. Enemies will time and space their attacks at the optimal range to cause the most damage. For instance, if you are moving towards them they will start their attacks a bit early to catch you coming in, but if you are running away they will try to over shoot you with their attack to catch you going back.
Hit Detection and Feedback Rework
Landing your hits has never felt so satisfying! I completely reworked all of the hit detection systems in the game for more accuracy, flexibility and improved visual effects. Each attack has it's own force and knockback values, which apply to both the player and enemies. For example, enemies can now knock you back with their kicks. Depending on the force value of the attack (heavy weapons have more force), it will accordingly have more hitstop, guard break and knockback. Some heavy enemy attacks can decimate your guard meter if you are not careful, so blocking is not always a safe bet!
See below for more detailed patch notes. This is nowhere near comprehensive, because there's simply too numerous to list, but I did my best. The state of the game is still fluid, so please let me know in the discord or forums if you experience any issues with the update, and I will do my best to address feedback and bugs. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Content
- All new enemy attacks! There's way too many to list. Some examples are the forest boss firing multiple homing skulls at you, big overhead boss attacks that crush your guard and armor, and many more you'll have to play to see.
- Added four core enemy behaviours, Flail, Retreat, Pursue and Wander
- Wander works similar to as before, an idle state before the enemy sees the player
- Pursue is the most sophisticated behaviour, taking different routes to the player, alternating between run and walk, and judging the best attack range for each attack. It will also react to your movements, walking backwards or strafing depending on your position.
- Retreat happens either when the enemy has no available attacks, or after a ranged enemy attacks. It will try to find the best route away from the player. This dynamic adds a lot of strategic consideration where you must either bash to close the distance, risking moving into a bad spot with other enemies, or take your time to reposition and find a better angle.
- Flail is the new headless behaviour. Enemies will move about and rotate in random directions while swinging wildy. Healdess enemies feel no pain, so they can't be stunned and will attack until killed. Sometimes, headless makes the enemy more dangerous than it was before so it's more important now to consider which limbs to remove based on your current position and situation.
- Reworked the player and enemy guard systems. Both have a guard meter, which is affected more by the force of attacks. Using a heavy weapon will more quickly overwhelm an enemy's guard, leaving them vulnerable. Enemies have a chance to block instead of getting hit as long as they have some guard meter. Attacking an enemy in the legs or back will bypass guard, or kicking them as before.
- If an enemy breaks your guard, it will do the remaining damage as a percentage of meter lost rather than damaging you 100%
- Enemy force multiplies durability damage to your equipment, so really big attacks will damage your equipment more
- Enemies can now kick the player to bypass their guard, unless you parry it.
- You can now parry traps
- Enemy poise system that can be broken based on how much damage you deal to them. Bosses have poise always, and regular enemies gain poise while running, giving them room to escape or time to land a running attack on you.
- Enemies now have individual stun timers, modified by the force of the player's attacks. Weaker enemies are stunned more, while bigger ones are stunned less. If the stun time exceeds the time of the hit animation, it will transition to a stun loop animation, as opposed to before where it would do super slow mo of the hit animation with inconsistent timing.
- Did a pass on every trap in the game to work with the new hit detection system. Enemies will no longer get displaced by spike traps, and will now get stuck on the spike if they manage to survive it.
Balance
- All enemy attacks now have much clearer warning indicators, timed appropriate with a UI indicator and a flash. The animations are also slower and easier to read in general.
- The player now has a brief stun animation when hit, but is immune to stun during the active frames of attacks to help balance it out.
- Attacks now do a fixed amount of damage rather than a random range as before. It's way easier to balance this way
- Player damage now must fall within a percentage health range, regardless of your defensive modifiers. This can help prevent one shotting, while also ensuring super tanky characters still take an appreciable amount of damage in order to avoid trivializing the game. These thresholds increase with each round.
- Player projectiles no longer stun enemies, since playing ranged is already enough of an advantage as is. You may need to kick or hit enemies every now and then if you find yourself backed into a corner.
- Removed enemy charge attacks. I felt these were a cheesy way at the time to compensate for the fact that enemies couldn't attack while moving. It's no longer necessary now that enemies can attack while running.
- Enemy move speed will increase gradually after completing each area. On torment, enemy attack speed will increase after each area as well
- Summoner enemies will keep summoning up to a maximum of two, as long as two are not alive at the time. Before it would just summon two and stop no matter what
- Player speed is capped at 50% now, and the scaling is squished so you need more speed to reach that number than before. Speed is really hard to balance with the enemies, so I want to ensure the range of how fast you are cannot be so much greater than the enemies that it trivializes them. Plus it's an insanely powerful stat in general
- Headhunter now has 50% chance to kill instead of 100%
- Remove hoarder short height
- Hunter class no longer has to decapitate to kill
- Reduce torment enemy health multiplier from 2x to 1.5x since enemies have a bit more health by default anyway
Polish
- Enemy movement now uses a custom system that is very precise and will be accurate even at high speeds
- Hit flash colors and feedback has been improved
- Tweaked the damage, hitstop, knockback and guard damage of every weapon and attack
- Flesh creatures on the wall such as the hand or face now receive all the same hit effects a normal enemy would for the most part (since they now share the same enemy hit code). As such you can now freeze these enemies, use blood ritual on them, etc.
- Severed limb physics look much more satisfying now, and will play a blood effect right at the location the sever took place which looks really cool in slow motion
- Enemy animations will smoothly blend between each other most of the time, instead of being jerky like before.
- Enemies now spread out more to prevent them from stacking on top of each other
Optimization
- Blood decals on the environment now work much more reliably and are better optimized
- New enemy logic is much more efficient than the old for the most part
- Optimized enemy line of sight checks which were very expensive before
- Redid how enemy minion spawns of all kinds work, and it's much more efficient now
- Enemies in arena battles will now respect the global enemy limit of 20 active enemies at once, which greatly improves the performance of hectic cave fights for example.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed many bugs with player damage calculations, hit detection and more
I apologize with how long this update took, and I hope the effort will be worth the wait. The enemy code was deeply entangled with many other systems such as traps and hit detection for example, which all needed to be redone to make this happen. With this rework, the game is much closer to my original vision, where dismemberment is meaningful, and the combat consistently engaging and challenging. It also paves the way for more easily adding new enemies and behaviors in the future. I feel I've been able to grow greatly as a game developer since release. Thank you for all the support to allow this to happen!