I’m having some minor site difficulties at the moment. For whatever reason, and this might be cleared up by the time this article is published, the gifs I embed stopped working. The ones in the old articles are still working, but the new ones aren’t. It should be taken care of shortly. I bring this up, because I’ve recently found that gifs strike a great balance between real videos and images. It’s a shame that I’ll have to go without for a short while.
As for the topic of discussion, there are, broadly speaking, two facets to implementing enemy subclasses. The first part, which I was dreading, is actually making the functional art. As I mentioned previously, I’d been relying on colour to do a lot of heavy work differentiating the various enemies. Unfortunately, now that different colours need to be reserved for subclasses of the same enemy archetype, I have to make each enemy clearly legible relying mostly on shape and size.
I’m proud of my programmer art, but it sure does stand out.
My second experiment with Machine Learning image creation, while less ridiculous, was no more fruitful than my first, which left me to scouring Itch for cheap 2D image packs from which to cobble something together. Luckily, there are a lot of those, and I was also cutting a bunch of enemies. I also don’t need things to look good, only legible. That means that a lot of my programmer art can stay in the game, provided it’s different enough from the other stuff in there. All told, I only needed to make a single set new images, which you see below you.
And that’s how we go from the image on the left, to the one on the right, where we now have three ranks militarized police, low level ZOGbots, FBI agents, and two fitness influencers. I threw in a few now unused graphics to represent other forms of trash mobs, and voila.
UPDATE: I think the problem has been fixed.
This reveal would have been a lot more impressive if I could have taken the screenshots with the lighting active, and if this site wasn’t blurring all of my images for no apparent reason. Anyway, the point is that it’s working, the new sub-classes are in the game, and hopefully they provide just that little bit of variety the game needs.
As for the programming side of this, there was almost nothing to speak of with the enemies themselves. I just made a few more prefabs, and tweaked a few values here and there. The main pain point was fixing all of the arcade spawning logic, as well as the now broken campaign mode. However, that was pretty much already broken, and I was planning on doing a massive rework of that anyway.
