How Do You Design a Cast of Enemies?

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The zombies from “Plants vs Zombies.” Their designs are simple, informative, and just plain charming!

The criticism with BoTW's samey enemies everywhere, I've taken to calling 'Minecraft Mob Syndrome'. Because no matter where you are, in 90% of the game you are dealing with the same four or five enemies, and the results can get just as stale.

Supporting Notes: -Recolors are a lot easier to swallow if each element is mechanically different. A fleshed out elemental system can immediately triple or quadruple the number of unique monster encounters you make. -Monsters can be made more varied by limiting the equipment or tools that hard counter them with specific requirements. Meaningful Choice is king here, not necessarily the monsters themselves. -Don't forget storytelling in mechanics, the lore is a decent source of inspiration for how to make monsters mechanically memorable. -The longer the fight takes, the less often it should be fought. A monster that takes forever to kill can feel like it haunts you everywhere even if it's only as common as everything else.

Note to self: Do not use pallet-swaps to make enemies tougher, use them to make different but related enemies. The red goblin throws a torch at you and then runs away if it hits so the fire's DoT can do damage while it hides. The blue goblin stays near the water and tries to throw a rope around you and drag you in. The yellow goblin blinds you with sand and then sets traps near you. They all have the same stat block, just different behaviors.

One way to spice up a bestiary is to take inspiration from Pokemon and, instead of making palette-swap enemies, give your enemies evolutionary/mutation lines or trees. This provides the additional benefit of potential world-building and environmental storytelling, and immediately clues a player in on how to beat the encounter since it's a variant of something they have already dealt with.

The Mario & Luigi series does enemy desings differntly, instead of making new mechanics or making the player approach the enemy in a different way (Like using single hit attacks instead multi hit ones for high defence enemies) the Mario & Luigi series makes enemies with unique attacks to make the player dodge the attack differently even when using the same concept.

My problem is not enemy types and looks. They can color-swap enemy types, no biggie. My problem is dominant strategy when dealing with said enemies. Their behavior has to be set up in a way that lets me experiment with the combat system so it makes multiple tactics valid and fun to do. I got this vibe from Nioh because you can switch between five weapon types + bow and rifle at any time, have different stances, use magic and ninjutsu to your advantage (debuffs, elemental effects) and work with the environment. This way, I beat some annoying side mission bosses with unusual setups because it worked for me and my playstyle or was just born out of pure necessity and desperation. The same can be said about Hollow Knight. Great enemy variation and a build-your-own-hero charm system that lets you choose your favorite style.

"Got your aesthetic nailed down" Shows a clip of Hollow Knight

I feel like there was a missed opportunity of talking about monster hunter, a game that NEEDS to have a great bestiary to work as it does. Edit: Fixed some wording

Enter the gungeon has a great line-up of foes. They fit the theme of the game, stand out visually and (most) are also quite adorable in a way.

I'm glad you gave Pikmin time in the spotlight. It really deserves it. So underrated. Don't Starve, for being a game who's combat amounts to wacking things with sticks, it still has good enemy variety. Spiders that are easy to kill but come in hoardes if your not careful, protective and territorial Tallbirds, Pigs that try to hit and run you and turn into Werewolves under certain circumstances. Tentacles that slap you silly. And the hounds that periodically ruin your best laid plans. It helps that they all tend to stick to their specific biomes. You won't find tentacles in the same place Hounds spawn (well, unless you make it that way) and the survival mechanics and the different things they drop means that fighting these enemies is less about when you'll fight them, but who you should bother to go after. Need silk? Spiders. Low on food? Tallbirds, or if your feeling cheaky, hunt for Koalafants. Even the time it goes into pallete swaps in the Fire and Ice hounds can be forgiven by the fact that they have their own unique mechanics and drops.

Earthbound : Let's Fight Tent, Speed Limit Signpost and Barf 😂

Bias in my name aside, I wanna shout out the Kirby series for its bestiaries. While they may be pretty simple to deal with thanks to how powerful Abilities can be, with the amount of them each game, it allows for a wide variety of enemies that are simple yet appealing and you can tell immediately what power they’ll give when swallowed. And at the same giving enough variance to enemies that DON’T give Abilities and are otherwise ammo when you lack one yourself. ...Unless it’s a Scarfy, Mumbies, Gordo, or Shotzo. Shoutout in particular to the Dark Matter trilogy (Dreamland 2, 3, and 64) for having to spread only a handful of Abilities compared to most other games to a big cast of enemies. Though it helps that they’re simple enough like Fire and Stone with the oddballs Parasol, Bomb, and especially Cleaning.

I tihnk Crypt of the Necrodancer did a great job at this because the enemies have a unique attack pattern and rythm to hit them, so much that there is a training area where you specificaly learn how to deal with that particular enemy using only the knife.

Sometimes instead/as well as a palette swap there can be signs of growth from one form to another. This isn't a red Goblin, this is Blue older goblin that fights fiercer and has grown longer teeth. It's small but makes the enemies seem like they are creatures rather than a change of paint.

I think the one thing I'd want to actively add to this, is that it can be important to have enemies that fill specific design purposes; such as acting as a tutorial for a mechanic, by requiring and / or encouraging a player to make use of it. One example that comes to mind; though unfortunately an example of where the game failed rather than succeeded, is that Hollow Knight does a pretty poor job of teaching players quite how powerful the Vengeful Spirit spell they acquire early in the game is; with the forced gauntlet after you acquire it only containing squishy enemies that the player is accustomed to, where use of soul on spells rather than saved for healing would feel like a waste, and a unique enemy that you need to use it on, which the player lacks an existing frame of reference on. If the designers had included an enemy that's tough to fight close range; perhaps evading after being hit, but is taken out in one shot from Vengeful Spirit, I imagine that many players would be far more likely to realise quite how powerful the ability they'd been given is, and be willing to spend valuable soul on dealing fast damage with it, rather than saving it to heal up after the fight.

The fact that pikmins enemies have such realistic survival tactics does so much for the game

I just finished watching Mark Brown's video on JRPGs in his "design icons" series, and I have to say, very few things in this life achieve the same level of perfection as Akira Toriyama's Slime design

The GBA trilogy and DS trilogy Castlevania games all have interesting bestiaries. Such exsamples like: •Iron Golum, that can only be instantly killed by two methods, but otherwise only takes 1hp of damage from all attacks and moves slowly. •one off enemies that can be completely ignored that you have to use special moves, or a certain action to get them to appear. •Enemies that drop items that help to heal the status effect they can cause if they touch you. •An enemy that is completely useless in attacking, but will call for reinforment if you let it escape. I could go on. •Enemies that have more then one state. •Enemies that change the surrounding physics, like gravity or block long range attacks. •stacks of a common enemy in one room that are much more dangerous then alone.