4.27.2018 - THE HORDE APPROACHES
We have been gearing up the production of our enemies as we get closer to early access! Here's an update on what's in process today - and where we are going.
Meet part of our spider family - all are in various stages of completion from grey-modeled through fully textured.
For simplicity, we share a limited set of skeletons with animations between various enemies - some of whom look quite unique despite the shared skeleton! As an example, all of these enemies use our spider skeleton, whether they are fat exploders like the Popper, or skinny projectile shooters like the Lightbulb Bot.
And there can be even more variations on a skeletion - these baddies all use our human skeleton (for those Unreal-philes, the "UEMan").
You can really get an idea of the variety possible from a single skeleton since this picture includes melee enemies, ranged enemies, casters in the front and even some legless guys in the back - all inherently sharing a single skeleton and often sharing animations.
Here are some big boys using the same skeleton - some of which are using jail doors as giant shields.
Even within a given model, there are other ways of adding variety. Every enemy in this picture uses the human skeleton, just like the previous sets.
Every one also is the same in-game race which we are calling the Oompa. (final name may vary) Custom weapons along with enemy model changes help to divide them into four distinct enemy types - snipers, grenadiers, diggers, and overseers.
Additional model changes give us a low level and a high level enemy of each type. Texturing will of course help separate them all even further since these guys are all brand new and thus all grey for the moment.
Here are a few enemies that use our turret skeleton. It controls our static turrets, and also the mobile turrets on tanks.
Here is a group of enemies that use our drone skeleton. Notice that they all fly. Making flying enemies look all sexy in game takes some extra animation (banking, reacting to hits/knockdowns appropriately, etc.) so putting them all on one skeleton helps.
The drone army is growing!
And finally our most basic of enemies - we call him the simple bot internally. One human skeleton, three difficulty tiers, all simple bot.
This was our original test case to see if we could have radically different proportions from the human skeleton. Even though he has itty bitty legs and no arms, he still totters around shooting laser bullets using human-based animations for a very inhuman critter. After that proof of concept, it was off to the radically-mutating--skeleton-races.
Thanks for reading! And don't forget to check us out during our Twitch streams - Thursdays at 5pm PST on twitch.tv/skullbotgames.