Hi, I’m Adam “Gahlammon” Dachtera, team leader and main designer of Bullet Waste, here to tell you about the design process of our enemies.

…um, I mean, enemies in Bullet Waste. Not enemies of Stork’Studios. Just to be clear.

Ma Meilleure Ennemie

If you had played one of our demos, you would have noticed that there was only one type of enemy. That is, if our demo hadn’t crushed you into powder before you would have reached one of them, of course. That enemy - Skullpion - was the only enemy developed by us for a very long time. Why? Well, because it had so many entertaining mechanics! It could jump at you and stick to your face, forcing you to do a quick-time event! It could push you back when you got too close! It could shoot at you! It could activate special bullet-hell like attack! But it could be done by one skullpion on the arena at a time. Also, it was invincible! Unless you have forced it airborne, of course. Ummm, I’m not boring you, am I?

Surprisingly, many people had real problems with understanding that enemy. They didn’t know what to expect from it, how did they get damaged or even had troubles with understanding how to kill their opponents. The last problem was the worst one, as our players couldn’t leave the arena while the Skullpions were alive, so they got stuck. Some people even thought there were actually two types of enemies, because they were considering bullet-hell attacking skullpion as a separate type of foe. During this attack’s animation skullpion stood on its tail, thus looking totally different from the basic form. It definetly didn’t help in recognizing it is the same enemy type.

The One That Had to Do Everything

After the second demo I had a long talk with one of team members, Szymon, where we discussed problems of that design. What’s interesting, he pointed out that the Skullpion was too complex, while I said it was not complex enough. Turned out there are two ways of understanding the complexity. Our three hour long chat ended with that image:

What you can see here are different mechanics, grouped into categories. These categories are vital to understanding the problem, as you can describe all mechanics in a single category with just one sentence.

You can define the Imp by simply saying it’s running around and attacking. Despite having many different ways of doing that, it’s intuitive and simple - running makes shooting him down a little harder, and attacking forces you to dodge or just keep moving all the time. Still, Imp has many different ways of performing these actions, which makes fighting it more interesting without increasing complexity. It can escape from you in many different ways, but you still just have to pursue it. It can attack you in many different ways, but you still just have to dodge.

With the Skullpion, it’s more complex. Aside from the mechanics mentioned with Imp, it also pushes you back when you approach it. It generates a lot of confusion when you are suddenly launched in a random direction (and mostly that direction is toward the chasm). It’s connected with this enemy’s invincibility, as you can only approach it after it’s stunned. Otherwise, it appears unkillable. It also has this weird attack with jumping on your face, which is hard to counter and actually stuns you for a short time if it hits you. This is a lot of different actions, but they are not really creating any big diversity. Skullpion always attacks the same way, always just go towards you and jump on you when you are close, which quickly makes fighting it very repetitive. As you can see, it has less mechanics than Imp, and yet I would say it’s two or three times more complex than the other enemy.

So, after the second demo of Bullet Waste, the time has come to break some skulls. I mean, skullpions. No team member was actually hurt in the process. I promise.

Breaking Skulls

The Skullpion was meant to be a basic enemy. It had to be as simple as possible. We decided to reduce it down to two mechanics. One of them is pursuing the player all the time, applying pressure and forcing them to move around the arena. Skullpions gained the ability to jump up and down the obstacles on the arena, which makes them very mobile and hard to avoid. Second one is the Skullpion’s “signature move”: jumping on player’s face. It no longer shoots any projectiles at you, but it has a weak melee attack with a little knockback. It can be dodged now, so it’s not even close to that powerful push from previous versions. We also made it killable all the time instead only while airborne. Now the enemy is more fragile and fighting it is intuitive - to kill it, just hit it. Here’s a little comparison of previous and current Skullpion’s version.

What about the other mechanics? Just throw them away? Well, no, of course not. Bullet Waste is supposed to be a bullet hell, and what kind of bullet hell would it be with no projectiles? That’s why we have created two new enemies, one of them based on Skullpion’s ranged attack, and the second one on it’s bullet hell like attack.

Meet the Team

Firstly, there is the Striker. He’s a basic ranged enemy, not really mobile, but with several attacks at different distances from the player. These attacks are more challenging than the previous Skullpion’s basic attack (which was totally ignorable) and inspired by attacks from bullet hell games, like Enter the Gungeon or Returnal. It means they can cover a wide area, but you can still fit yourself in a gap between projectiles and continue to run forward uninterrupted. Attack patterns change based on your distance from the enemy, to make sure you’ll be able to dodge them. For example, the closer you get, the slower the projectiles are, so they reach you in similar time. Striker also has a melee attack, similar to the Skullpion’s one, but a little stronger.

The second enemy is the Flower. It’s a stationary, turret-like enemy, with slow attacks that cover wider area of an arena. It hangs somewhere in the arena, supported by vines. These can be cut off to lower the Flower’s head and make it more accessible. However, direct hit to the Flower’s head will kill this enemy instantly. Its attacks are harder to dodge, and force you to just choose another path on the arena, blocking the one between you and the Flower. Some of these attacks can even create a stationary field of projectiles that blocks a part of the arena for a short duration.

You have one job

After that separation, the game got faster and more understandable. Simplified enemies are now easier to understand, as they have a specific job to do and are unable to do anything else. Removing the stun kill condition from our enemies made them more vulnerable and allowed us to place more of them on the arena. Diversity of the enemies forces player to approach each one of them differently, and react to situations where the enemies are in a specific configuration that makes killing them harder. Each role is now assigned to a specific type of enemy, so if you want to get rid of, for example, large area attacks, you know you have to focus on Flowers first. It offers a more customized approach to the game and really helps it being more approachable to everyone.

Ok, I think that’s all for today. Stay tuned for the next posts, not only these Bullet Waste related!

Gahlammon