This week we’re getting into one of the funnest parts of the monster and combat overhaul: monster attacks! As Armagon mentioned in yesterday’s post, Tiy and I have been going through each of the possible monster heads and coming up with a characteristic ranged attack to match them. Some of the attacks are similar to the ones you’ve seen before, firing directly at the player with various kinds of projectiles. In addition to adding a lot more of these, we’re mixing it up a bit with some different patterns. For example, ballistic projectiles are now properly angled to hit targets at different ranges (and with different gravity):

Other monsters will have ‘ranged’ attacks that are AoE (area of effect) and hit all nearby enemies:

This is just a small sample, but we want to leave some to be discovered! Once we have a set of these basic ranged attacks, we’ll move on to more elaborate special attacks for rare monster parts, unique monsters, and bosses. Some other, less exciting things I’ve been working on include moving control of the script tick frequency from configurations into Lua (monsters will update more frequently while in combat to balance responsiveness with performance), helping kyren track down rendering bugs, and continuing to refactor monster code for consistency and maintainability.