Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:
Today let us take a look at the mostly-finished deer enemy that we have been discussing in recent weeks.
When left on its own, the deer will run back and forth for a random amount of time between 3 and 5 seconds. When this timer ends, the deer will stop for a moment and play its Idle animation. Then it resumes running, again randomizing the running time.
As for the gameplay design of this deer, my idea was to have an enemy that, when it detects you, raises up and shoots you with a laser beam. The raising up action will be the telegraph to the player that the attack is coming.
Here we have the Attack animation that plays when the deer detects the player:
The first track plays the correct animation frames, at the proper speed and timing.
The second track calls functions that show the particles that appear around the laser (these do not show in the animation editor for technical reasons, but they do show in-game), and also at the end, calls the function that causes the deer to play its idle animation before resuming running around. However, if the deer still detects you after shooting at you, it will fire again.
The third track causes the actual laser sprite to fade in, and fade out.
And finally, the fourth track enables and disables the hitbox of the laser, allowing it to damage the player.
You can avoid the attack by either running away, or by crouching.
So if the deer does not detect the player after attacking, it will play its Idle animation and then resume running. However, if you are crouching in front of the deer, it will skip its Idle animation, and go straight into trying to run into you.
It is this decision that I believe completes the design, and makes this an overall interesting enemy.
Thanks for reading!