Why do we position ourselves as the enemy of the player? We aren't making a game as punishment, we are trying to give those who are kind enough to give us their time a pleasant experience!

A thought just hit me moments ago... I have spent most every bit of energy building up my enemies so they can pose a threat to the player. I have spent very little energy to make them satisfying to defeat.

Has anyone here played the classic goldeneye? The enemies were dumb as rocks, but what made them VERY unique, is their animations were slow and gave the player time to aim, and execute them as their bodies rag dolled and displayed damage in ways that were totally revolutionary at the time! It was so satisfying to have this period where enemies became damage sponges that reacted to being blasted in ways that were very fun to the player.

Golden Eye is a classic not because the developers solely obsessed over making their enemies difficult (they were), the core reason Golden Eye is a success is because they took great care to reward the player for unloading on their enemies with great feedback and AI systems that didn't seek to punish the player.

So to this end I have decided I'm going to slow down on building up the difficulty, which we as designers tend to be far too obsessed with, and spend a bit of time thinking "How can I make my content more fun to dominate", how can I empower the player to have enemies to fight that are satisfying and rewarding for them to fight against?

So here's my thoughts on how I can achieve this:

I'm going to make some dumb enemies, dumber than anything else in my game. They're going to do no damage and their attacks will ONLY stun the player a short bit and send them knocked back a touch. They're going to mindlessly chomp their jaws towards the player and be big tanky fish.

I have the ability to set the eye color of fish, and I'll be adding a new blink mechanic where their eyes will turn the color of their skin, to hopefully make it look like they've closed their eyes and are "wincing". I'm also going to spend some time polishing the hit animations and maybe add some new ones that will play based on the direction damage is coming from, so whacking an enemy in their tail will cause their tails to be knocked around, hitting an enemy from below will cause their body to arch downward, and the same for top down attacks towards them.

I had this idea for big tanky fish that will be nearly impervious to damage with huge armor that will divide all incoming damage by 90%, but when a certain animation plays (think king hippo), their guard will be dropped and for a single hit, they will be susceptible to full incoming damage. I believe it will be very satisfying to charge up the biggest hardest hitting attack and unload it at precisely the right time. I'll add some mechanics where hit sounds will be overwritten by clank noises to really sell that these fish are taking almost no damage while their guard is up.

Some Ideas for sprucing up enemies (currently enemies are mindless drones that ALWAYS just charge at the player face first.

Flank: I want to make it so sometimes enemies will choose a random point between them and the player, and add an offset based on their transform.up vector3, this will give a random point for them to swim to that will give them a new angle of attack and break up the monotony of them ALWAYS V-lining it to the player ad nauseum. But perhaps I'm overdoing it with AI revisions right now, there's plenty of untapped potential in the current systems and there are far more pressing things to do. I'll disseminate these thoughts into my todo list and maybe we get to them at a later date!

I need to think these over, these are ideas just off the top of my head and I'm not 100% sold they'll be worthwhile, especially the flanking AI stuff. Gotta be careful not to make AI overly complex, simpler is almost always better when it comes to enemy AI, a dumb easily understood enemy is far more fun to defeat than one that does random things and breaks in various edge cases. Difficulty doesn't have to come from complex, buggy coroutines.

Edit: HAD A GREAT DAY OF DEV! Things took a bit longer than expected, but got solid gains with most all the things I wanted to do today. Core systems are a bit better every day. Better controls, better enemies, better particles, better projectiles, better levels, better code, better design tools, and on and on and on. There's so much stuff that it's easy to forget all the crap you're working on, but every day everything is getting a bit better...