If you’re not familiar with the concept of combined arms, it’s a form of military organization where different types of weapons are integrated together into units so that they can cover each other’s weaknesses. For example, a combined arms formation of tanks and infantry allows infantry to screen for the tanks to prevent the tanks from being hit at close range in their blind spots, while the tanks can provide heavy fire support to infantry if they run up against a fortified position or enemy armor.
I design enemies for Guardian Cry in the same way - each enemy has a distinct niche, and their abilities complement each other to make them more dangerous when combined. I introduce them separately where players can learn and exploit their weaknesses, and then I make the player fight them together.
The enemies in the Guardian Cry demo provide a clear example. Gremlins (the purple rat-looking things that pop out of walls) have a projectile fireball attack that can hit the player anywhere on the screen, but they have a low attack rate, low health, and are immobile. This means that if the player can get close, they’re pretty easy to kill.
Fire Snakes, on the other hand, have high health, a large profile, and a short-range spit attack. Their large size makes them difficult to avoid, their spit attack forces the player to pay attention and carefully manage their range and angle of attack, and their high health means they take a bit of time to kill. They’re slow and have a low attack rate, though, so they don’t present a lot of immediate danger. All this combines to form an enemy that, while not super deadly, makes an effective wall.
Finally, we have Firedancers. These roly-poly lizards barrel toward the player character at high speeds, leaving fire in their wake. Their high-speed charge, and the fact that they make the room more dangerous the longer they’re alive, means that they must be dealt with quickly. However, alone, they’re easy to manage - stand still, let them roll toward you, then hit them with your sword when they’re close enough.
Now we apply the principle of combined arms. The player enters a room. There are gremlins on the far wall, Fire Snakes in the middle, and Firedancers that charge the player. The Firedancers create a threat that the player must immediately deal with. The player cannot simply stand still and hit them as they come because the Gremlins are launching fireballs that must be dodged. The Fire Snakes creep toward the player, slowly constricting the area in which the player can maneuver, which makes it gradually more difficult to both dodge the fireballs and the Firedancers. All of this comes together to form a demanding encounter from simple, complementary pieces.
Helldivers does this very well. Small enemies advance and harass you, distracting you from much more damaging medium enemies. The medium enemies put pressure on you so the even more damaging heavy enemies can either charge you or get in to firing positions. If the players don’t have tools to manage each of these - high rof and area weapons for horde trash, mid-range weapons with good accuracy and lots of ammo for mediums, and hard hitting heavy weapons for tanks and chargers - they’ll get overrun. If they fixate on the tanks the light enemies will flank them and rip them apart. If they fixate on the lights the heavies will close the distance and destroy them with melee or cannon fire. They need a balanced set of tools that can effectively deal with each class of enemy.
I’ve heard good things about Helldivers. Might have to check it out.
It’s great. It’s a very tightly built tactical coop shooter that really rewards team-work and cooperation. It looks like a normal horde shooter but that’s only superficial. Once you get to the higher difficulty levels you need to really take team comp, strategy, and cooperation seriously to succeed. The community is currently losing it because a new mission type was introduced and it’s “Impossible” because most of them have never been confronted with a need to adapt their tactics and strategy to meet the objectives of a mission.
The first one is great, too, and has a small but dedicated community if you’re curious.
The robot enemies do this very well, the bugs seem like a ammo check more than anything but I haven’t got very far yet
The bugs use waves of hunters to eat at your flanks while warriors and brood commanders and bile bugs charge you. Chargers prevent you from fighting from a static position, and titans complicate any static defense. Stalkers hunt you down, which puts pressure on the team to divert from their main objective to kill the stalker nest.
Mobility and proper threat assessment is really key with bugs - stalkers are the s tier threat, followed by hunters and bile bugs, then warriors, with chargers and titans near the bottom. Getting overrun by hunters means you’ll either get killed by the hunters, or killed by everything else while you deal with the hunters. Meanwhile, chargers and bile titans can be reliably kited forever if you you’re fast with the dodge button.
You also need to constantly stay on the move with bugs. It’s always shoot and scoot. If you stop moving you’ll get rapidly overrun. People get tunnel vision trying to blow up chargers, then get swarmed by everything else. Or they fixate on fighting a wave of bugs, either not knowing or forgetting that a lot of the bugs are fairly clumsy and you can duck and dive through them to keep pushing the objective. With bugs you really, really need to hit the objective hard and fast then gtfo before their numbers build up.
Like egg nests are a nightmare because people stop to shoot bugs outside the nest when they need to assault trhough in to the nest area and wipe out the eggs asap. Instead of carving a path through the initial defenders and wiping out the eggs they end up running in circles outside, or even away from, the nest as more and more bugs spawn.