Snipers serve a very important niche within a shooter sandbox, driving players into cover from long range, and denying free movement in certain areas. They get an unfairly bad rap because the overpowered versions destroy the player’s ability to leave cover entirely. If tuned properly they’re a great counter to the pure circle strafing gameplay that this style of game defaults to. They’re also the easiest enemy type to program, mostly because they barely move.
Upon spawning they pick an empty pre-calculated valid sniper spot, run to it, and then stay put until they die. This is required to avoid them clumping up next to each other at the spawn points, which leads to mediocre gameplay and looks stupid. I’ll eventually change this to something a touch more sophisticated, but it’s good enough for now.
Projectile based enemies are most dangerous at close-mid range, and decrease in threat level as the distance between them and the player increases. The snipers are designed to be the opposite. To limit them in close, they have a very low turn rate, which allows the player to easily defeat their targeting with simple strafing.
This lets them fulfill their intended role, as an individually weak enemy who can be a menace if combined with enemies flushing the player out of cover. In order to beat one sniper, all that is required is a touch of patience, weaving through cover until close enough to damage them with pretty much anything. The challenge comes from doing this in the presence of other enemies.
However, they still didn’t work quite right at a distance, so I reduced their shot charge time to one second, then decreased the damage they deal to be about one quarter of your total health per shot. Previously they were almost always a total irrelevance, but occasionally killed you in one shot. Now they’re a much more consistent problem, and every now and then it makes sense to occasionally eat a shot as a lesser of two evils option.
Combine that with a few bug fixes and general improvements, and they’re in a good spot, unlike these next few enemies.
THE FIRST CUTS
Below we see Body Positive Bertha, in all her programmer art glory. She just got a makeover, with screenshake, shaders, and texture lighting borrowed from other explosions. I also added a bit of flair to her expulsion of the sentient tumors.
Bertha becomes so obese that her body nourishes multiple sentient tumors, who go on to chase down the player upon her death.
Bertha is to a large extent a reskinned version of the carrier forms from the original Halo. Her self-explosion damages not only the player, but other enemies caught in the blast area. This is the only enemy ability in the game that can damage friendlies, and there’s strategy in terms of when and where to set her off, since she can serve as a kind of free grenade if used right.
I’ve always liked the resultant gameplay. The issue is that no one has cared about body positive activists for years. I, personally, can’t name a single one. That’s partly because they keep dying, but mostly because, in a post-Ozempic world, it’s kind of a dead meme. Nobody with institutional power takes these people seriously, and now it feels more like I’m mocking fat people than sticking it to ZOG.
On the topic of health and wellness, I’d rather rip into the steroid abusing social media fitness influencers. If I included Bertha, I’d have to include them as well for balance, but I don’t have the time or inclination to flesh them out as enemies, and it’s not clear what role they’d serve in the sandbox. I’m sure they could fill a niche as a melee damage sponge that flushes the player out of cover, but plenty of other enemy types can do that.
Occasionally, I’m a Both Sides guy myself.
I’m starting to feel the same way with respect to the BLMers. In a pre-October 7th world, they could do no wrong. Post October 7th, they’ve seen their institutional support almost completely dry up. To the point where we’ve seen numerous examples of ZOG collecting their scalps after they get too uppity towards Israel, as most recently seen with Jason Arday.
While as vicious and deserving of hatred and scorn as ever, their collective political relevancy is but a half notch above that drug addict on the street corner threatening to kill you. In 2026, if they make the cut, why not the “nazis” in Ukraine, who “denounce racism and nazism” while bragging about being subservient to Jews? The problem with including proxies is that they’re subject to change on a whim, which risks seriously dating and muddling the message. 
More importantly, they’re just not that much fun to fight. The “fiery, but mostly peaceful protesters,” were given fire based attacks to serve as a sort of area denial, but that served an at best vague gameplay purpose. Likewise, the female BLMer twerking the player to death, while funny the first time, became background flavour real fast, and was never particularly riveting gameplay.
As far as flavour goes, I liked the idea of the male to female troon ripping his dick off and throwing it at the player, while leaving a trail of AIDS-ridden blood that serves as a unique form of area of denial. The same is true for the female to male troon throwing a scattering of bathtub testosterone pills at the player. But all of this is merely acceptable gameplay, nothing special, and we’ve already got the antifa as an enemy to hit those notes.
Some of these archetypes may get rolled into bosses – one in particular comes to mind – but as generic enemies they’re getting the axe. So are the Adult Baby Diaper Fetishists, albeit for a different reason. The AI behaviour of the antifas fits them well, but they’re too disgusting to even parody. I can’t imagine asking an artist to create realistic exploding adult diapers, and don’t think I’d enjoy a game that subjected me to that.
There is an inverse relationship between the amount of enemies, and the development time allotted per enemy, which leads to a certain numerical sweet spot. A tiny number of well made enemies or a large cast of mediocrities both lead to a game that is bland in terms of gameplay and flavour. On top of all that, some enemies are just inherently more fun to fight. Leaving them offscreen for a while risks irritating the player. These cuts are far from painful, they’re long overdue.
PALETTE SWAPS, RESKINS, AND WEAPON SHARING
Since I’m on something of a Halo kick as of late, I decided to look up the number of enemies in Halo:CE. There are four Covenant; the elites, grunts, jackals, and hunters, three Flood; the combat forms, carrier forms, and infection forms. The sentinels round out the sandbox as the eighth and final unique archetype.
Each type necessitated unique artwork and programming, and all of them fit the sandbox well. Given their limited resources, it would have been impossible to create new enemies. Instead, Bungie pulled out the palette swapper, edited a few numbers controlling health and behaviour, mixed up the weapons a touch, and popped out something that wasn’t brand new, but different enough to keep things fresh.
There are two ranks of jackals; green and orange, three ranks of grunts; orange, red, and silver, and five ranks of elites; blue, red, silver, invisible, and gold. Factoring in the different weapons they can carry gives us seven grunt, nine elites, and five flood combat form sub-types. That’s how we go from eight enemies, to twenty six, with almost no additional work.
I’ve talked about reskins, where I incorporate cut archetypes into different flavours of the trash mob. While that should be done, those still require unique artwork and voice lines. The best solution is to simply do what Bungie did. Get an enemy type working really well, then just subclass it a few times. It’s a trick that I’ve totally underutilized thus far, mainly because it will totally break my level/scenario system, but that’s just a bullet I need to bite.
