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- 2023/03/25 -

This week, I worked on porting the remaining three enemies from SD2020 to SDR.

The Rabbit, the Lamia and the Eye were originally conceived to fill out the enemy roster after the original four (or, six) enemies were already added. With the most basic enemy patterns already implemented, these three showed symptoms of power creep, and thus were perfect for becoming late-game enemies.

The Rabbit was designed when I was transitioning into the idea of designing minibosses, but still thought that the game could use more enemy types. The result was a visual design that was much less abstract and much closer to a real animal, wearing a hat like a human - all to convey that this enemy was one step above the rest. The game mechanics of the Rabbit were equally grand, as the idea was to make this enemy attack in a wide range and make the player perpetually calculate and dodge dozens of pellets, as if SD was a bullet hell game.

The enemy was slightly inspired by the widely accepted fan portrayal of Cirno - the Rabbit inherited narcissism, magic powers, and a seeming disinterest in the target of its attacks, as an extra special reference to Cirno's Ice Sign "Icicle Fall". The Rabbit's orbs also prompted me to design pellets that could not be hit by Pawn's sword, as I did not want the player to be able to disrupt the Rabbit's primary attack method.

The Lamia was the first enemy to be added in the proper concluding phase of SD2020's enemy design, and it is the most inconsistent enemy in the game. Its name is the most arbitrary among the seven, and went through a few iterations, such as "Naga", "Bat" and "Support". Its original intention was to power up other enemies on the screen, making them shoot and move faster. SD2020 still has the graphics for that behavior, and refers to the upgrade state as "Hate".

The only aspect of this scrapped idea that remains in the game is the calm facial expression of the Lamia itself, which was supposed to convey that Lamias could not "hatify" each other, because they are too calm and collected.

The enemy was redesigned in a way that preserved its passive nature and made it less reliant on other enemies. The Lamia as it is today does not attack Pawn first, but sends homing pellets every time Pawn swings her sword. This requires that the player is aware of when and where they decide to attack, and as a bonus, makes Lamia the only enemy in the game who cannot be killed in one swing when faced one-on-one.

The Eye was the last enemy to be added, and it was on the brink of me running out of imagination. The Eye was designed to be a proper endgame enemy, and its appearance was supposed to signal that the stage it appeared in was in the latter half of the game. Whereas other enemies punish the player for failing to deal with pretty much the same thing all around (dodging and hitting pellets), the Eye is supposed to punish the player for not expecting the game to arbitrarily punish them. The Eye only attacks when approached, and can only be defeated by approaching, forcing the player into a very specific scenario.

To preserve some player agency, the Eye was made to only attack when the player turns their back on it. And in SDR, with the Bomb's friendly fire change, the Eye can also be destroyed with a convenient explosion nearby.

With all the enemies ported, the next step is to port the differences in their behavior depending on the selected difficulty level.

Surprisingly, at no point during the development of SD2020 I thought about adding health bars to enemies, even though the inspiration source game does feature multi-hit targets. Fair Mode was taken as the basis, Hard Mode was based on the Lamia's scrapped Hate mechanic, Easy Mode was an exercise in figuring out how to let the player go AFK without dying, and Pain Mode was a purposefully ridiculous over-the-top upgrade of all enemy patterns.