So what's up with the super tough sneks in Mutoid? I've had a few comments about the difficulty scale as soon as these fellas show up. In this post I'll go over their design, and why they are so tough!

I added the sneks to the game because I needed a ranged enemy. At first I had plans for them to burrow underground and pop-up sporadically to attack. Due to lack of time, I scrapped my ranged enemy and simply made the sneks ranged. They fire 3 toxic projectiles, that when hitting someone, turn into toxic puddles for ~5 seconds. I wanted these projectiles to be dodge-able, so the player had to avoid them at the same time they were strafing around the mutant hordes. I don't feel like I did a good job making them very avoidable. While shooting horizontally, you may notice the spread is significantly better. This is because they target your exact location, then a few points up and down from where you stand. That means if the snake is below you, the spread is a LOT less (still just moves along the y axis). In the ported version of Mutoid, the spread will be adjusted to be based on the trajectory angle.

While in the rush to get the game out, there were a few enemies that didn't see the light of day. Namely the bagger enemy evolution stage, and the boss enemy (A hulking compilation of dead bodies that are held together by tentacles). With the lack of enemies, I was forced to find a way to make the game seem more completed than it was.

So I added a score and distance to the game-over screen, and scaled the difficulty way up! The sneks are not actually that difficult in singles or even duos, but after you hit the 4000 points mark they start coming in groups as big as 5-6. This makes the game extremely hard, and most people can't reach the finale. The finale itself is rather underwhelming without a boss, just a horde of enemies that when cleared gives you a game win screen. So I felt like losing before the finale was ultimately more satisfying than reaching the end of the game and it feeling like there was a lack of content. I still feel like this was the right choice given the options, and makes the game feel like there is more to it than there actually is!

I'm still working on porting the game to the Godot engine, progress is slow as I learn some of the quirks of Godot. Right now I have some basic collisions working with bullets and monsters.

When the port is completed in Godot, I will continue to work on making the game "completed". I plan to feature a few bosses, a lot more enemies, weapon pick-ups, new levels, and more!

If you're interested in following my progress, you can follow me on Twitter!.