Devlog Five: Combat and Enemies

Taking very clear inspiration from the slime enemy in the game Minecraft, I worked on implementing an enemy that could patrol around and chase the player down when in range.

Additional functionalities the slime has consists of the ability to deal damage to the player and also to split into smaller slimes upon death.

Using Unity's built in NavMesh components, these slimes can patrol a preset area and randomly select their next path when they reach their destination. This allows for a completely random patrol route for the enemies, making them unpredictable to the player.

The player has several different combat abilities they can utilise against the slimes including; a basic melee sword swing, a grenade like explosive and an impale ability such as the Earth Spike ability from Dota 2.

Each ability has its own individual cool-down time and UI element to notify the player when the ability is ready, allowing for effective timing of your attacks.

If the slimes deal too much damage to the player then the player will die and respawn at a designated position.

Using these abilities, the player can destroy the slimes until there are none left. The player can tell if the slime, or themselves, is close to death by looking at the health bars.

There is a great deal of customisation available to tweak the player's combat abilities, such as; the player health, the range the bomb can damage enemies, the speed at which you can swing and many more features. This allows for a great deal of control over how the combat feels and plays.

Overall, I am really pleased with the outcome of the combat system. Each ability feels unique and effective against the enemies, the UI elements give the player feedback about their attacks and the combat is smooth and bug-free.

However, implementing these systems into a wider project may be quite time consuming due to the large amount of components used.