Artificially Dead
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General Update #11
🕑 Added 2023-02-03 16:44:57 +0000 UTCHello again. For this update I thought I'd share one of the newer work in progress enemy designs I've been working on currently, I'll also be talking about progress on coding and the overall design direction of the game regarding enemies.
Coding
Progress has been good here for the last month. As it is, the H scene system is completely done and functional. Keep in mind I call this the system itself, there is the additional system to be included that will enable other enemies to join into a scene for multiple participents. The base system itself though? Entirely working unless I find new bugs. All enemies when detecting the player is stunned will now stop any attack or action they are performing to approach and start the scene, including ranged enemies.
With the H system done I will for the time being looking to working on a few features that will be integral to the game as a whole. The main one I'm going to be working on next will be the ability to disable entire parts of the map if the camera currently isn't enabled on that section. This will help greatly to decrease any kind of framerate lag and put less demand and stress on the system in general. There's no point having enemies moving and active in rooms you're not in after all.
This system will hopefully enable me to create a map that won't have any load times and enable the entire castle to be a seamless experience from room to room.
Design
So in terms of design I wanted to talk about a couple things. The first being enemy sizes. The enemy imaged above is currently the largest enemy I've designed which allowed for more detail than usual, especially around the face and chest. There are currently three enemy sizes - One is the exact same size as the Player character. The second is a medium-sized design that is used by the Tomb Queen that was pictured once before on this Patreon. And finally the third and largest design will belong to this enemy, who I currently do not have a name for.
Any enemy that is larger than these three archetypes will typically be special enemies; like the Kraken girl pictured before, or one or two boss enemies that may take up most of the screen. I'm not usually very interested in enemies that are so large that you cannot reasonably interact with them, but every game like this needs one or two huge bosses right?
With such large enemies the potential for more detail increases. Particularly I've been debating on adding mouths to every character. The reason I hadn't before was because at such a low pixel count my options for making a mouth that looked good was limited to quite literally two or three pixels. Nipples also got a nice new design with the new largest enemies. I will debate trying to use this for other enemies, as it just looks a lot more appealing. A downside with more detail of course is that it increases the time an animation will take to create.
Besides enemy sizes I wanted to briefly talk about the general 'factions' or 'races' that'll be encountered within the castle.
As expected one such enemy variant are maids, they'll all be human enemies and of equal size to the player. They will be found mostly in the beginning areas of the castle. A second enemy type that is already confirmed and decided upon is the 'Tomb Faction'. These enemies will largely be dark-skinned girls of an Egyptian theme. They will mostly be sized equally to the Player character, but there will be a few enemies that are of the Medium category.
These two factions are already set in stone but there are others with a couple enemies already that I plan to expand upon. These include but are not limited to; Vampires, Demons/Devils, Dragons (though they will remain humanoid and monster girls. The large enemy may already be one of such enemy category if I choose to give her wings), an Eastern faction with Samurais and Ninjas, and also an Elven faction, both light and dark-skinned depending on location.
Enemies are going to be location-specific but there may be a few outlying enemies that fit no faction or race, and of course there will be more factions to come.
Summary
This was a relatively long-winded update to make up for the small one last month. Progress is continuing nicely and with the H system done I'll be focusing a lot more attention on new enemies, animations, H scenes and level design.
Thank you once more to the few of you supporting, it means a lot to me!
