When I’m creating enemies for Seed of Life, I’m not interested in only making goofy-looking robots that just stand in your way, which you can get rid off by simply spamming the attack button. In a different game, where combat is central, you’d expect to encounter enemies in every corner. But in a game that’s built around exploration, like Seed of Life is, not only do enemies need to be interesting and fun, they also need to serve a purpose: their placement and behaviour need to be the way they are for a reason. Sometimes that reason is obvious (for example, you might find bosses just before unlocking a new ability), sometimes it’s more implicit; but in both cases this purpose is the reason I’m trying to keep enemy fighting engaging for the player.

In this article, I’m going to talk about the different steps I go through when designing enemies for Seed of Life, in this case, the Genesis Turret.

Practical case

After the player has gone through the tutorial, they should be familiar with the most basic mechanics and concepts of the game, which means it’s now time to spice things up. I needed an enemy that would prevent them from doing what they want to do, forcing them to either destroy it, or try to sneak their way around it. Because of that, this enemy is no longer optional, which means that now it has to be fun to deal with, otherwise it just becomes a source of frustration.

Design phase and Concept art

Now that I know where I’m going, I need to know how to get there. An easy and maybe a bit clichéd way to make the player understand that this enemy is not your average underling, is to make it big. It also hints the player that this particular enemy must eventually be dealt with, one way or another. On top of that, I would like to allow the player to run away, in case they feel they’re not ready to tackle this challenge. To do this, one can make the enemy immobile, like a turret. Making it immobile however can easily backfire if it doesn’t pose a serious threat, so it will need to have several means of attacking the player.

“Immobile”, “Big”, “Turret”, “Several means of attack”, those were the keywords that I used when creating the concept art, and here’s the design I came up with:

Now, obviously, in terms of “art” I could have gone much further but I didn’t, mostly because my drawing skills are terrible, but also because the point here is to create a “concept”:

• The turret stands on three robotic legs, allowing it to orient itself, and maybe even to move on short distances.
• The canon is gyroscopic, which means it will be able to aim with great accuracy.
• To add even more accuracy, the head of the turret can also rotate. This also gives the turret a little bit more personality, as it makes it stare at the player.
• The turret will fire upon the player from a distance.
• The turret has a weak spot underneath its main body, that extends when it’s about to fire. This will add a little bit of gameplay to the fight, as the player will need to time their attacks accordingly.
• In order to protect its weak spot, the turret can also strike the ground and create a shockwave.

That is the concept I’m going for. Since I’m much more comfortable with 3D, I’ll make adjustments to its overall design along the way.

In-game implementation

Skipping through the coding of its behaviour, and the authoring of required components, the enemy is now ready to be implemented in its environment. It’s now time to make sure that everything works as expected of course, that the gameplay is engaging and interesting, but most importantly that this enemy serves its purpose as intended.

This is the final result:

The player is now required to put their skills to use in order to fight this enemy: they need to stay in movement and to time their jump correctly, so that they can avoid the turret’s laser and the shockwave it generates. But if they do not want to fight, they also have a chance to sneak around it, by avoiding getting spotted by the turret’s red scanner.

Obviously, this fight is not particularly challenging, the reason for that is that this enemy is one of the earliest you’ll find in the game; what matters is that the fight is engaging and interesting. That being said, in the future I might implement additional, more creative ways of fighting this enemy. For example, as the player progresses through the game and unlocks new abilities, maybe they could use them against this enemy in order to fight it differently. That would also give some sense of progression.

Conclusion

This is how I proceed when I need to make a new enemy for Seed of Life. I believe it’s important to keep everything interesting, this applies to combat of course, but also to gameplay in general. In order to achieve this, knowing where I’m going is crucial, and this is why I first come up with a purpose for each decision I make.