Dungeon design journal #4: making a monster
Introduction If you are using Inform ATTACK, how much code does it take to create a monster? Six words. The boar is a hostile person. I have spent a considerable time coding up three monsters for my dungeon crawling game. The third one took me about 1600 words, which is a little more than 6. Where does the discrepancy come from? One of the main design goals of almost any tactical combat game should be to make the enemies as diverse as possible. This is not necessarily easy. Desktop Dungeons , which features only a handful of monsters, has only few good ones. Mostly it is just the "raise one stat, lower another" approach: a monster with a lot of health but little damage, a monster with little health but a lot of damage, a monster with high magic resistance but low health. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has many awesome monsters, like hydras and ugly things, but also (certainly on the earlier levels) a lot of monsters that feel more or less identical. And I for one wasn't i