Enemies

Enemies refer to all entities within the game which have assigned behaviors to hinder the players. Enemies fall into one of five categories, depending on their health and attack patterns: Popcorn, Grunt, Elite, Captain, Miniboss, and Boss.

Popcorn
Popcorn enemies, named such based on Prof. Beeman's analysis, refer to enemies whose sole purpose is to be slain in droves by the players. These enemies are personified by weak attacks, extremely low health, and simple, swarming behaviors. Popcorn enemies almost always appear in hordes, though single popcorn mobs may be found scattered throughout levels. Enemies like this are important to establish and flex the player's sense of power.

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Rats
Rats are essentially the embodiment of the popcorn enemy. Capable of swarming the player and not much else. Notable as the first enemy to make it into the game.

Size: Tiny

Base Damage: Low

Speed: Medium-High

Attacks: Nibble: The rat wiggles for a moment, then lunges forward, damaging the player slightly.

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Bats
Bats are alternate rats. Meant to add variety to the popcorn enemies the player is cleaving through. More difficult than rats, because it requires a flight animation. Bats have a smaller aggro radius than rats, and will fly in place/in little circles until the players get closer.

Size: Tiny

Base Damage: Low

Speed: Medium-High

Attacks: Bibble: The bat wiggles for a moment, then lunges forward, damaging the player slightly.

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Grunts
Grunts are Goombas. Kobolds. Slimes. Default Joes. The purpose of grunts is to set the baseline difficulty of the game, as they are the scale by which the rest of the enemies are adjusted. Grunts should require little more challenge to beat than Popcorn mobs, with their survivability coming from requiring two hits on average - instead of one - as opposed to difficulty coming from actual mechanics of the enemy. Enemies like this are important to help teach the player basic elements of the game and establish baseline power levels.

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Caterpillar
Caterpillars would be randomly wandering mobs; relatively non-threatening to the player. They move by hopping each segment of their body sequentially in an arc. The primary purpose of this mob is to add visual appeal and variety to rooms, not to add challenge for the players, although they are capable of damaging players.

Size: Small

Base Damage: Low-Medium

Speed: Low-Medium

Attacks: Body Slam: If the Caterpillar is within range of a Player, he makes a longer hop. If any segment of his body collides with the player, he deals damage.

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Eyeball Tower
Eyeball Towers are static entities which fire projectiles either towards the player, or in a static direction. Towers should be able to shoot in 1,2, or 4 directions. These will allow us to add timing challenges to traversal sections, or modify the difficulty of various sections by adding towers

Size: Small-Medium

Base Damage: Low-Medium

Speed: Low-Medium

Attacks: Eye Laser: The tower shoots in the direction it is currently facing.

Elites
Elites refer to any enemy which presents an advanced threat to the player through its mechanical elements. Enemies which force the player to attack from a specific direction, use a specific attack type, or work together with their allies to defeat an enemy that could not be defeated alone all qualify as elites. Essentially, an elite should force players to stop and rethink their current plan of attack, rather than continuously W+m1'ing. These types of enemies are important to challenge the player to try new strategies, and maintain challenge within primary action loops.

Leeches
Jockeys are like the Jockeys from Left 4 Dead 2, or like Metroids. After selecting a target, it charges, attempting to attach itself to a player. If it successfully attaches, it cannot be removed except by another player. Potentially, being Leeched could stop a player from attacking, making cooperation between players even more important. The primary purpose of this enemy is to help encourage cooperative play during combat sections of the game.

Size: Small-Medium

Base Damage: Low-Medium

Speed: Medium

Attacks: Leech: The leech attempts to attack to a player. If it successfully attaches, the player panics - waving their arms frantically and uselessly - and cannot attack unless another player removes the leech from their head. The player is slowly drained as long as the Leech is attached, causing it to grow larger and gain health the longer it's attached. The Leech cannot attach to another player until it is detached from it's current player. We should consider adding a mashing element to allow players to free themselves, but I like the forced cooperation this adds.

Captains
Captains refer to enemies which are not threatening when alone, or in the same sense as other enemies, but provide some strong incentive to the player to attack them before other enemies. Enemies like this are important to force the player to make intelligent decisions in the heat of combat.

Echoball
Echoball is an enemy created from emitters emitting emitters. Starting as a cluster of 2-4 orbs, it begins rapidly splitting into copies of itself. Each orb splits into a number of copies before attacking the player. It should always be able to split at least once before players are able to destroy it; it's starting placement in a room is much more important than a standard enemy. Once the Echoball has reached a certain condition, it becomes hostile, and launches towards the players. Echoball MUST have a maximum number of total echoballs on-screen to aoid performance errors or crashes.

Size: Small-Medium

Base Damage: Low

Speed: Low

Number of Splits: 2-4

Attacks:For The Blob!:Once an Echoball has reproduced as many times as it can, it launches itself towards the players, damaging those that it hits and destroying itself on impact.

Time's Up:If the Echoball reaches the maximum allowed number of Echoballs, all currently living Echoballs become hostile, and launch in a wave towards (to be determined)

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Treasure Goblin
Treasure goblins are blatantly and without apology stolen from Diablo. Treasure goblins, when they appear, are only briefly vulnerable to player attacks, during which time he drops weapons, gold, and stats each time he is damaged by players. His appearance should be a big intensity spike for players, who should want to hit him as many times as possible before he escapes.

Size: Medium

Base Damage: None

Speed: Medium-High

Attacks: Dash: The treasure goblin tries to escape the players at all costs, fleeing around the room. His movement is augmented by periodic bursts of speed to help him stay away from players.

Minibosses
Minibosses exist fill the same purpose as elites - to force players to rethink their current combat strategy and change up the action loop - but with an even greater effect on the current game state. Essentially, they're DOUBLE-ELITES.

Bosses
Bosses are the weakest enemies in the game. They aren't important for any reason, have nothing to do with providing satisfying intensity peaks or closure of the experience, and should probably just be ignored entirely.

Each boss has a unique "enrage" effect which occurs once the boss it at <33% health. These add a nice little spike of difficulty or variety towards the end of a fight.

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Rat King
The rat king is one of the earliest bosses the players will face. He's made of dozens of smaller rats which come apart and attack the players when damaged.

Size: Large

Base Damage: Medium

Speed: Medium

Attacks: '''Charge! '''The Rat King winds up by wiggling his body, and then charges in the direction of the closest player. If he encounters a wall, he will stun himself and lose some rats, which will then attack the players.

Frenzy: Upon Enraging, the rat king will spin rapidly, knocking back nearby players and all of his remaining attached rats. His wind-up and charge animations have their length reduced by 40-60%, and his speed is increased roughly 30%