Welcome back to the fourth ever VV Eekly Update! I’m pleasantly surprised that people are still reading this – thank you all for your feedback and comments. I appreciate y’all reaching out to me individually, but please also feel free to comment in the Discord server! 🙂
Today, I want to talk about my favorite enemies I’ve designed – beetles! First, we’ll talk through some of my overall thoughts about encounter design, and then we can delve into how beetles incorporate into that. If you don’t read anything else here though, check out the last gif posted below!
Encounter Design
An encounter is a single room of enemies, usually designed to test player skill in particular ways. Encounter design can make or break a game – good encounters can challenge players in “fun” ways, whereas bad encounters can be too challenging, too boring, or somewhere in between. However, it can be quite difficult to find that correct balance and the right kind of challenge to be fun.
With Vyn and Verdan, encounters are typically comprised of many enemies. With early encounters, the enemies should be fairly simple, and many simple enemies can come together to make a complicated encounter.
In each encounter, players are asked to do two general tasks: 1) deal damage and 2) avoid damage. For dealing damage, players have to track their own influence and their partner’s influence distributed across enemies. For avoiding damage, players have to keep an eye on all targets and assess threats.
The V&V design mantra is “Challenge through coordination.”
Overall, players should be able to easily predict enemies individually, but the challenge is to assess the entire situation at once and to coordinate. Players have limited resources to deal damage with, which requires cooperation to maximize, and avoiding damage is a constant re-evaluation of threats and of how your partner is moving.
Beetles do a great job of encouraging both these behaviors!
Beetles
Let’s start with the biggest beetle: the charging beetle.
Charging beetles lock on to a target, gear up for a short period, then charge recklessly until hitting either a target or a wall. The real charm of the charging beetle is that gearing-up period. It telegraphs to a chosen player that they should prepare to do something. Should that be “dodge the charge” or should it be “bait the attack towards my ally”?
Each charging beetle essentially denies a swath of the playing field. However, players are given a window to choose where the charging beetle charges, thus giving power to players. This works great when there are multiple charging beetles, since players have to keep track of all of them charging at once.
The medium-sized chasing beetles constantly chase players around in a meandering way. They don’t move very fast, but they’re always chasing you! However, they can’t turn very fast.
Chasing beetles require players to know where beetles are and where beetles are facing. You can choose either to be far away or to be just behind their backs for safety. They’re not very smart, so having one player bait them in one direction while the other player hits from behind works well!
The smallest beetles, egg beetles, are just chaotic fun. You can see for yourself…
Beetles are just the start of enemies designed in Vyn and Verdan. As per usual, please beetle your way to the Discord to leave any comments!