Enemy Animations & Game Over Screen

I did a lot of work this week on Goblin Hero’s enemy monster sprites – redraws, compilations, and even early experiments in attack animations. I also implemented a fancier Game Over screen. We’ll go over the enemy art first.

A promo poster featuring my current best enemy designs.

This is a promo-poster style image of my twelve best enemy monster sprites as of today. After compiling all of them into one image, I decided to add a tagline and give it a “movie poster” sort of vibe. I’m really proud of these designs and might actually get this printed on poster paper in the future.

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In other art news, I’ve started experimenting with attack animations for enemy monsters! These are simple, short, four-frame animations that would loop maybe twice when an enemy attacks. This is my first time animating anything other than tiny overworld sprites and it’s actually really fun and rewarding to do. It would be a lot of work to animate 150 enemies though, so this may or may not actually pan out.

The new Game Over screen with the Guardian Angel animation and randomized quote.

Lastly, we have the new Game Over screen, featuring a new character, the Guardian Angel. This is a sort of abstract design I stumbled upon while workshopping what was at first intended to be just another enemy. The design became more and more “divine” feeling until I decided to do something important with it. The idea for the Angel is that it visits the player character in dreams and offers vague guidance and ominous hints, and also appears to greet them at the Game Over screen when they die. I’ve given the Angel a randomized list of appropriate quotes to say for the occasion, things like “THIS TOO HAS PASSED,” or “WELCOME HOME.”

The two new functions for Goblin Hero, loop_animation() and game_over().

Goblin Hero is starting to get a little weird! I guess that will happen after six months of development. I’m toying with the idea of adding enemies and plot elements related to time travel as well, including enemies from the future, present and past. We’ll see how it all pans out!