A lot of my favorite games – Soulsbornes, God of War, the original Dooms – all feature hand-crafted enemy placement and spawns. I am a big fan of authored, curated gameplay. I was the most worried about that last thing. It’s very rare to feel like you’ve just had a fresh moment when you’re playing the same set up for the twentieth time. There’s no way in hell that this tiny team could ever script the gameplay, but even if we could, it’s not that great for multiple plays. We needed a good procedural AI director.But we’re not making a horde-mode game, so we needed the flow of the battle to feel more natural. You enter the witch’s territory, she’s trying to stop you from getting to her, so she throws her minions at you over and over again until she’s too weak to keep defending a given area. We didn’t want the gameplay to feel like it’s wave-based.But even with magic, barriers can feel a bit artificial. The witch is trying to stop you at all cost, and she could spawn barriers as a trap. We could have easily used classic barriers, too, as the lore and story allow them. Even Soulsbornes do it for bosses, although at least the mist lets you escape and reset the fight. Basically, in games like Painkiller or Devil May Cry (see the example image below), magical barriers appear, blocking you from leaving the current arena. We needed a barrier system that does not feel like a barrier system.We made our lives much harder that “just” this, because, for example: The ultimate goal was to make sure that every attempt to get to the boss is fun and the failure results in “I want to try again.”
#The vanishing of ethan carter sniper rifle series#
a meadow or a bridge) manually spawning a wave of enemies over and over again, the next step was to prepare a series of arenas with multiple waves per arena. Because what does it even mean, “too well”?Īfter having fun on a single “arena” (e.g. The former is not that interesting, just a regular development thing, but the second is a good lesson, so let me talk about it a bit more.