Creature Design Categories

In designing creatures (and especially enemies) it helps to define categories. This not only makes it easier to design, but gives the player some sense of structure. It can be satisfying, upon meeting new enemies, to already have some idea of how to defeat them based on their design.

For that reason, enemies are typically designed with some kind of iconography built in.

These concept sketches are for creatures in the ‘shooty’ category - that is, they fire projectiles.

In the above creatures, they all have a down-ward pointing triangle as part of their design. While meaningless on its own, it gives a visual indicator to the player when they encounter a new creature of what kind of behavior it might have.

By contrast, the ‘dasher’ category, which contains creatures that suddenly dash towards the player, all have a kind of cape or trail to them. These design elements need to be consistent enough to be recognized while also giving room to design unique variants.

That’s all for now!

-Leo