Outside of the boss, each enemy held many similarities. Each enemy had a vision, hearing and sight component that would be able to detect the enemy and engage in agravated behavior. Each enemy had a universal damage component that would take damage inputs from all sources, including from other enemies.

Enemy behaviors were designed using Unreal's Behavior Tree and blackboard system to hold variables that can be evaluated by the behavior tree and tasks. While the behavior tree showcased to the left is to large to break into detail, every enemy behavior tree roughly broke into three parts. The non combat state (where an enemy looks around or patrols), the player spotted and pursuit stage, and the attack phase.

The Madkar Drill was the base grunt of the game, tpyically group with other Madkars. They have two attacks, a swift chop of the pickaxe and a wide up drill that deals more damage. To give them exra flavor, and not to overwhelm the player, there is a separate manager that gives only one Madkar the right to attack at once. Madkars will also premptively maintain their distance and take turns attacking to give the illusion of coordination even though its just self preservation and cowardice.

Thezven Saws control the tempo and force the player to be aware of their charge. They rev up their hard hitting saw and charge at rapid speeds towards the player. Given the biggest area takes place in a poisonous swamp, I wanted to introduce a sense of recklessness in the Thezven Saw. As such, I reworked their attack to use physics propulsion instead of obeying the nav-mesh. If the enemy ends up out bounds, by falling into a dangerous area not covered by the nav-mesh, it will die

The Gulluch Cannon wants to keep its space and fire shots at Seethe from a distance. Between firing shots, it will back pedal away from the player if it gets too close to have a clear shot.

However, if the time calls for it, the Gulluch cannon will charge at the player and self destruct.

Video has audio!

The last enemy waiting is the engine of haste. The final encounter mixes up his physical strikes with a laser barrage. Once it drops health below quarterly intervals, it will fire a special attack like the shockwave that drains the user's focus.

When came to death animations, I noticed that anything we could use to cut down on the animator's work load would be optimal. Especially for something as menial as a small death animation. So I decided that I could come up with a way to save the animators work while getting the players excited about scoring a kill. Using Unreal's Chaos engine, I was able to break apart the enemy model into bits when the player scored a kill. Under the hood, when an enemy is killed, it is added to the enemy pool and then a "killed enemy" model is spawned.At the beginning of developing this feature, I really wanted to go all out on the amount of broken parts and the force in which they would be propelled at.

Obviously overboard; but we wanted to sell the effect first and work backwards.The end product was much more subtle break while still being satisfying to perform.

After I presented the three enemies, and boss to the team, the work got handed off to the concept artist.

Madakar Unit Concept Art

Afterwards the concept art would get back to the rest of the team where we would make sure that it was everything we asked for. Once that was approved, the modelling of the enemy would begin.

Once the modelling was done, it would be passed to the rigger and animator to begin working on the animation hot list while it was being textured.

When a head, body and legs of a dinosaur are put together, it creates a Tinysaur which gains autonomy!

Tyran-Nosaurus-Rex

We had an array of parts to choose from that we made in house. You could create a complete T-Rex or mix it up to create a cute afront to god. The entymology of each Tinysaur is put together by taking the genus from the head and body and the species from the name.

Ptera-Hippus-Mammoth

Getting new parts is as easy as digging up mounds. To not make digging so tedious, and give the Tinysaurs some more purpose, I gave them the functionallity to dig up mounds when assigned.

Each Tinysaur had its own aggression score based on the parts it was made of. Parts from herbivores give a lower score than carnivorous parts. If a Tinysaur has a high enough or low enough score, they will run from predators. Although, given they don't attack, it looks like carnivorous Tinysaurs just want to make a friend.

As previously mentioned our team finished in the 70th percentile of all teams despite not wanting to go all out.As a developer, I learned that you can do a lot with a little. I had to fill my hands with a lot of boilerplate outside of gameplay. Keeping my scope small and keeping the joy centered around the little ways Tinysaurs interact with the world.From a producer perspective, the biggest lesson learned here is that an appropriate scope and insuring that everyone is excited to do their part is as good of a motivator as a pressing deadline. It decreased burnout, kept people wanting to improve their work and stuck around long enough to review other games as is Ludum Dare tradition.

Clueless friend who thought the game was only about crinoids