More monsters (kobolds? amoebas?)

I’ve got quite a few new monsters working. Here’s some.

These are part of a family of creatures I’ve named “orebeasts” because I couldn’t think of anything better.

Battles in this game take place via cards, some of which are Weapon types (swords, spears, and the like), others are Specialty (classic magic and a few other oddities like herbs or poison), and there’s a last unnamed category for cards based on physical principles (gravity, space, time, etc). Normally these last few cards are only accessible to a very small subset of plot-relevant characters. Orebeasts are an exception.

Orebeasts, for some reason, have access to these rare cards. The real reason I avoided distributing these cards to enemies is because it’s tricky to get the AI working with them, since they often have very out there effects. But I got at least some of them working reasonably.

The quartz orebeast (purple) uses gravity cards to fling rocks at you or create gravity wells to attract you (and maybe later fling those wells at you). The electrum orebeast (grayish and green) uses electromagnetism to, well, to magnetize you and make it difficult to keep a stable position.

The kobolds! They are cute and have an interesting mechanic. I’m almost considering making them the mandatory “mascot mook” of Ubiquatopia, because no RPG is without one.

The idea behind kobolds is that the presence of each one contributes an effect to all kobold allies (including the user). Kobold scouts (green) increase movement of all kobolds, mages (blue) increase range of attack, and berserkers (red) obviously increase power. All of these effects stack, and disappear as soon as the offending kobold is defeated. These little guys are weak on their lonesome, but can get dangerous if they attack in big groups.

Future kobolds will probably have more dramatic effects than merely upping stats. Perhaps giving everyone drain? Shielding damage? Ailment immunity? So many ideas.

And that’s an amoeba. A gigantic one. It will clone itself when attacked, and sometimes even if you do nothing it will still decide to clone itself by sacrificing health just to spite you. You will want to take them out in few hits, but you won’t want to just sit idle and let them multiply either.

And now for the boring details.

First, I’ve worked quite a bit on the AI, and now the CPU should be able to semi-intelligently use some of the weirder cards. Such as the gravity card Fling, that requires you to target an obstacle within range and then decide on a direction to throw it at, hurting the first unit in its path. Now the AI will actually throw things at your characters, avoiding paths that would hurt enemies or end up crashing against walls.

I also made a quick and simple jumping animation for a leaping attack that I would like to reutilize with some other cards. It required genuine use of parabola equations, which is honestly the only reason I am mentioning this point at all.

Other minor notes: now enemies can be a bit bigger than usual (minibosses maybe?), and I prepared a few data-related things such as new cards to include, recipes, materials and enemy drops. I also improved just a little how my simulations work. Now I can just copy-paste the results on Excel!

Next, I’ll keep working on enemies, and maybe cards and quests. Next enemy tribe will be cats. Chess cats.