Good afternoon!
This wednesday, I'll introduce to one of the late enemies of the game: the Moleoids!
What makes them unique, and what differentiates them from similiar enemies?
Let's take a look!
Gameplay
(they are still work in progress, of course. I think I should position them better on the tile...)
The "Moleoids" were created to fulfill a specific need: enemies capable of avoiding traps.
Some might argue that dwarves already serve this purpose, but from a strictly technical standpoint, that's not quite accurate.
Dwarves can avoid obstacles, but if an obstacle is placed directly in their path, they are forced to stop.
Moleoids, on the other hand, are not.
If they need to go underground, they will; nothing stops them!
The only way to block them is to place an obstacle exactly where they resurface.
Otherwise, there’s nothing that can truly halt them!
They also have a particularly interesting trait: when a Moleoid is underground, the player can stand on the same tile as them!
However, this comes with a caveat.
While underground, Talpoids are completely immune to any offensive actions from King Shorty.
From a level design perspective, implementing them turned out to be more interesting, and less difficult, than I had initially expected.
The only real challenge was communicating how this mechanic works to the player.
Unlike regular enemies, an underground Moleoid is hard to spot and visually track.
The solution being implemented is to show a small mound of dirt on the tile where the Moleoid is burrowed.
This mound will be designed to clearly stand out from the surrounding tileset, with special handling in edge cases, for example: if the surface tile is already occupied by a crate, the mound won’t appear, but the tile will still look slightly darker than normal ones.
There are 2 Moleoids in this image. One is under the chest (with a darker black, as always WIP), the other one is under the tile below (the arrow is there just for the screenshot.)
(The mound of dirt has not been implemented yet, as I'm not yet satisfied with how it looks, so nothing to show!)
Design
Initially, much like the dwarves, Moleoids were quite different.
They were meant to follow custom paths in each level, carrying oversized bombs that would explode every few tiles.
Although the idea was intriguing, I ultimately decided not to implement it, for three main reasons, one more critical than the others:
- There wasn’t much thematic connection between moles and bombs. (This could've been addressed by tweaking the design, but explosions didn’t feel quite right in a fantasy/medieval setting anyway.)
- The bomb mechanic took up too much space in the levels, significantly complicating navigation and making level design a nightmare. The bombs would also destroy every element in the environment, further increasing complexity. (While this could have been managed by refining the mechanic and making compromises, I felt it would’ve resulted in a gameplay element that lacked identity and inspiration.)
- It was extremely difficult to clearly communicate both the mechanic and the enemy. In a game like this, where planning your moves is essential and in which the player relies heavily on being able to predict enemy movements and trap behavior, having a mechanic that changed enemy movement in every level made this predictability impossible, undermining one of the core pillars of the game’s design.
In the end, I decided to focus the Moleoids on being "trap/obstacle-evading" enemies, setting aside the explosive concept, at least for now.
It might be an idea worth revisiting in the future.
So...
That’s all for today!
Hope you enjoyed this devblog and found it interesting.
-Giuseppe