When I started to think about enemies, I looked at the main theme of the game: a mop who fights aliens using soap. This gave me some freedom with the look of the enemies and helped me a lot considering my so limited art skills.
The main inspiration has been the alien character from The Simpsons:
For the sake of simpler animation I removed tentacles and added a couple of very stylized feet, and tried to give the alien a dumber expression. This is the result the efforts of one year ago. I tried a couple of times to re-design this art, but I'm kind of attached to the original sketch…
The basic green alien
- HP: low
- Attack: ranged (one projectile)
- Damage: low
- Spell: none
- Special abilities: none
Then it’s been easy to recolorize the original alien and add a couple of details to easily obtain more enemies:
The blue alien
- Hp: medium
- Attack: melee
- Damage: medium
- Spell: none – green smoke – purple blasts (depending on the level, will differentiate the three versions soon)
- Special abilities: Immune to soap bubbles thank to a red energy shield
The laser blaster
This is more a kind of mechanic considering that is not damageable, but I like to include it in the enemies because of its aspect.
- Hp: N/A
- Attack: ranged (pink laser)
- Damage: High
- Spell: none
- Special abilities: none
The red boss
- Hp: high
- Attack: ranged +melee
- Damage: high
- Spell: green smoke
- Special abilities: Immune to soap bubbles thank to a red energy shield
The second section (levels 4 to 8) is set on a beach, so I enriched the model with a sub suite to obtain a water themed alien.
The water alien
- HP: low
- Attack: ranged (three projectiles)
- Damage: low
- Spell: none
- Special abilities: none
At this point the enemies looked almost all equal, so I tried to sketch some different shapes to add some totally different villains. Trying to get inspiration from the water theme, and from tropical carnivore fishes, I ended up with a sort of pirana.
Pirana
- Hp: low
- Attack: melee
- Damage: low but with high rate
- Spell: none
- Special abilities: sticks to the player and continues to bite
Following the same theme, I also designed the final boss of the second section, a giant evil pulpi:
Octopus
- Hp: high
- Attack: melee + ranged
- Damage: high but low rate
- Spell: purple blasts
- Special abilities: Immune to soap bubbles
So I added some variation, but the enemies were still being a little monothematic from a gameplay point of view: they had almost the same abilities, just mixed differently. I really needed some gameplay variation in the fights, so I tried to design a couple more enemies which could add some more “spice” to the combat sessions.
Spiky
- Hp: medium
- Attack: melee, bounce off the player
- Damage: low
- Spell: none
- Special abilities: Explodes the soap bubbles thank to its spikes
Flying little pulpi (aka head of d…)
- Hp: low
- Attack: ranged
- Damage: low
- Spell: none
- Special abilities: Flies!
The last two new enemies added a lot of variation to the gameplay, especially if you consider the several combinations that can be done with other villains: a spiky in front of a green ranged alien forces the player to avoid the bullets instead of simply cast bubble continuously, while a flying pulpi together with a blue melee alien forces the player to interrupt an attack to avoid the projectiles. I’m afraid that sometimes I exaggerated with the difficulty, especially when I tried to combine environmental threats and enemies, but this is something a good playtesting should address.
I have a couple more ideas to implement and playtest, but for these two first ambiences I think I reached a good variety. Perhaps now it's time to renew and differentiate the green-blue-red enemies’ art!
Cheers
SirLuke
