Enemies
Player experience
The swarm is the crowd you clear and the points you farm. Elites are the problems a weapon pair and a spell are for: skullworms, quadrupeds, Orobas, and scorpions. Portals are where the horde comes from, and you break them at their weakspots. The Leviathan is the boss. Its other name is the Skull Squid.
Who appears in a chapter lives on that level.
Product goal
Enemies are the pressure a kit is built to answer. The bestiary gives each creature a role so a level can cast a chapter, and so a quest can be about that creature. A boss is a level's signature fight.
Open
New enemy varieties are still open. A new kind gets a child page when it exists in the project.
Swarm
The horde
The unique zombie horde: a cloud of thousands of flying skulls. You kill them for points, and you push them with the wells and the blasts. Most skulls are fodder. A few are tougher and pay more. The overwhelming number of skulls is the core challenge.
Skullworm
Small and Long
A worm of skulls cuts through the horde. Faster and more deadly, these wind up and strike from a short distance, so you deal with them first. There is a shorter one and a longer one. It does not shove aside the way a skull does, and it paths on its own loop: seek, attack, cooldown.
Quadruped
Quadruped
A beast on the floor, running you down. It does not fly with the skulls. Touch it and it hurts. It is harder to push than the horde, and killing it spills mana.
Orobas
Orobas
Orobas orbits you. It locks on, charges, and cuts a beam across the ground. Then it recovers and starts the circle again. Killing it spills mana.
Scorpion
Scorpion
A scorpion of skulls comes at you, and the tail whips over its own crown to slam down. The head keeps coming while the stinger strikes. Kill the head and it drops mana. Kill the stinger and it pays more.
Leviathan
Skull Squid
Leviathan is the boss, a skull squid that holds its ground. Attacks draw inspiration from on-rails shooters and their bosses, like a boss at the end of a Star Fox level, firing waves of projectile patterns at the player. Attacks are telegraphed, then fired, then a brief cooldown before firing again. The horde is still present. The boss is the thing the round is about.
Portals
Spawner, weakspots, mega portal
A portal opens and the skulls pour out. The weakspots are how you close it. A mega portal is the same idea, bigger. Leave it up and the horde does not stop.
As built
Swarm
What the player can do
The horde is the swarm managed by IEnemyManager. Skulls spawn from the round and portal flow, steer as a group, and can be pushed by force fields and weapon wells. The player kills them for score. Rendering and pool size are on the enemy render config in as-built assets.
What ends it
A skull leaves the swarm when it dies. The swarm itself ends when the gameplay scope ends. New skull variants that are not in the enemy assets are not in the game yet.
What is saved
Nothing about individual skulls. Kill totals on a scored run are stored with the score.
Elite enemies
These are the non-swarm enemies and the boss that exist in the project now.
What the player can do
During a life the player can meet skullworms, quadrupeds, Orobas, scorpions, portals and their weakspots, mega portals, and the Skull Squid boss. Each has a definition and a pool factory in as-built assets. Portals bring more enemies. Weakspots are how a portal is broken. The boss runs projectile patterns from BossPatternDefinition assets.
What ends it
An elite dies, a portal collapses, or the boss pattern ends. All of them unload with the gameplay scope. Kinds that are not in those assets are not spawned.
What is saved
Nothing per creature. A quest step can credit a boss id or a family, and that quest lifetime is saved with the profile.