Trapper enemies in Platformers

 So far with designing trapper enemies such as the cannon slug turtle the overall enemy design being used for both movement, shooting and dropping slime that slows down the player. Trapper enemies being used to control space are effective in multiple manners.

Well in this case both a trapper and a zoner. The two combined playstyles make it hard to approach and hard to keep your distance depending on the life of the trap, how easy it is to avoid/ damage the trap, etc.

This changes many playstyle aspects depending on the trap and how effective the tool is for keeping the player at bay. The distance factor multiplies their effective combat use with non-brute force.

It also allows for more smart difficulty which I will go through and talk about later.

The pressure put on by more traps and more environmental damage factors means it's harder to play risky, in this case having the slug enemy drop a slime trail behind them you have to be careful about the enemies you took out from behind you and the enemy in front of you.

This does reward more safe playstyles, however playing too safe and you have threats behind you to deal with. The fun of combat with trapper playstyles to deal with is risk management, having to manage defensive play and offensive play.

An idea to introduce is shields destroying slime trails and because shields cost energy, you see where this is going; waste energy on destroying the slime trail to get closer for aggressive attacks or play safer and hope you can deal with any ambush on the backside.

Fun combat is that forces interesting choices to be made and difficult to balance the risk.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Psychological manipulation #2 Big numbers

 This is a fine balancing act for players but the goal of the matter is to keep going for the big numbers and keep the big numbers with them getting bigger, and bigger then you get the picture. With this not only having one set of numbers get bigger but having the other numbers get bigger as well. You need some form of system to keep the players wanting the numbers to get bigger. For idle clicker games you use the reset system to get the player coming back; with the MMORPG system you scale down those numbers in updates so you can keep numbers getting bigger or use the shared power system for the players to use. Personally I like using an XP reset system; once the XP hits max for the level, the XP subtracts from the XP cost bringing it down to 0 and as thus allowing that big number of XP to still feel big. Then you might be asking about the player leveling up which there is always the COD reset level system where once the level hits a big enough number you have it where the progress...
Read more

Power Creep

 Power creep can be both a good and a bad thing. With power creep you have it where players are being fed more powerful items or cards where they ditch old equipment for the new toys and make it so players will actually use it. On that same note you're trading the learning the items/ understanding how to make oneself more powerful through strats by relying on your given powerful new toys and making players throw them away again once more toys do show up. It's a useful investment strat for card games but does get boring for games where the only thing you have to look forward to is bigger more powerful numbers instead of different strats/ tactics you've never seen or used before with the bigger numbers feeling meaningless. Person experience; with Yu-Gi-Oh playing the rogue format was more fun even if I lost because I wasn't losing to the FTK format and actually scaled down in power with having fun seeing different strats/ tactics, that the limitations that were self impos...
Read more

Deck Size matters

 Small decks These kind of games make it where the game is being given a more consistent/ predictable strategy. The outcome being much more predictable but having it where players are dealing with mill and burn strats far too often making them busted. Large decks These kind of games make mill/ burn strats basically useless but have less reliance on consistent drawing what you want; however in a game where search abilities exist with the more search power the more options that open up and remove the down side of having a larger deck becomes.
Read more