September 25th Update (Patreon)

This week I wanted to give combat a little variety.

Not yet ready to start adding in new spells, or animated any complex new attacks, I instead modified the enemies behaviour to change their approach to attack.

The enemies report to a manager class when they decide to attack the player, and depending on the number of enemies, the "Enemy Manager" will tell them how to attack. To start I'm keeping it simple. The enemies may try to flank behind the player from the right or left, they may decide to ONLY do ranged attacks, or just straight up attack the player.

One thing to note, right now it doesn't tell the enemies WHEN to attack, only how to approach it. Given the slow motion feature I'm currently trying, I think the player ought to handle attacks from many enemies and directions at once. I don't think there is a need to do something like the Arkham games, or Shadows of Mordor and have a system artifically control who attacks when.

P.S. Enemies not running straight at you can be a little more difficult to hit!

Besides changing this behaviour, I've also made a few changes to the way they receive damage, and react to receiving damage. This is in anticipation of some ideas I have for some magic spells.

I've also currently set it so that an enemy who takes damage, even if they never see/lose sight of the player, will abort their patrol path, and start to wander around. Always seemed silly to me that in stealth games, when the alarm was cleared, everyone just went back to doing what they were doing like nothing happened.

That's about it for what I wanted to talk about this week!

As always I'd love to hear comments and questions/concerns!