Greetings.

In this devlog we thought to give you an insight into the work process behind one of the enemies we have been working on recently, The Brain Blaster!

The first step to making an enemy is to write a short design doc outlining it´s features, attacks and abilities. The Brain Blaster is suppose to fire bullets from its many turrets in varying patterns while moving about. After this outline has been written, a quick, initial sketch is drawn and then that is refined into a sprite which is then set up for animation.

~ @Scimitri

Hey, Nathan here. When Anton was done with the art for the Brain Blaster, It was time to actually make them function in the game.

First step was making it shoot. If it didn’t shoot it would be pretty boring and crappy. No one likes boring and crappy enemies.
We made the cannons of this enemy separate to the main body, by doing this we are able to place as many as we want and have them act independently of each other. This meant that I was able to make up a sweet sequencing system for the cannons. Whenever we place one of these enemies in a room we can add as many steps to the sequence as we want and have the guns shoot in cool little patters as you can see in this gif.

Once the shoot sequencing was done it was time to give this thing the freedom of movement!
For this we wanted to be able to set up paths throughout a level and have it follow the path’s points in order. This works similar to the shoot sequencing, except instead of shooting it moves to a new target location. When it reaches that location, the sequence continues to the next step and the Brain Blaster moves to whatever position is in that step. We can have as many steps as we want in a sequence. You can see it following a simple square sequence in this gif.

That was it for the Brain Blaster’s main functionality. The last steps were making it killable and adding the usual gore effects to go with it. Expect to see Brain Blasters in World 3!

Did you like this more technical style of dev log? Let us know in the comments. If y’all like it we can do more!
~@NathanAuckett