Spiked in the Head

Here is an enemy I just wrote for Hoop Fighter for the iPad. In the video you will see what I ended up doing, but let me back up a bit and explain some decisions I made.

I was given the Spiky ball as a test enemy. Here he is...

As you can see this is a test render and so isn't lit etc. Still I was given this and I had pretty much free reign over what I could do with this. Now it's a ball, and erm.. it's spiky. So what should I do with it?

I have two main areas to attack Kal, the top or bottom half of his character. So I figured this object should be thrown at Kal by someone off screen. It IS a ball after all, and balls get thrown. As for it being Spiky, well I hope that just adds to its atmosphere and dread by the player. As it is extra scary with the spikes, I felt that this object should instill fear and so decided I should make it do something Nasty.

Nasty can come in several flavours in a game like this, lets revue some of the more notable and obvious ones.

• Size. I could make this really large.
• Speed. I can make this travel at great speed.
• Damage. do a significant amount of damage to Kal.
• Stealth. Make it hard to see.

I chose to go with making the ball slightly larger than a real basketball (Size), and also I went all in on the Speed, and now this enemy flies so fast at Kal that it can be a real shocker. So I had my design and just had to implement it.

To get the ball to have some character and make it appear to function in the 'real' world. I gave it a simulated gravity which is great for making people believe it is connected to the scene and 'real' world. I then worked out the speed I wanted the ball to move at and then added the correct vertical velocity to get the ball to fly up and then collide with where Kals Head could be.

Once I had the Spiky ball targeting correctly I added in the hit to Kal and finally the reaction of the ball after it hits Kal in the head.

The last touch I did was to give the player points for sliding under the spiky ball. As the ball is s dangerous I have not allowed Kal to be able to kick or punch it.

And here is the final product...


spiked ball attack from Robert Toone on Vimeo.
In this video you get to see the ball fly in and smack Kal on the head, and also it's reaction afterwards. The way in which the object reacts after the impact tells the player a lot about the object, such as it's weight danger level.

A very fun thing to create, Hope ya like it.

Da Voodoochief