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« on: May 12, 2013, 08:16:28 pm »
... exaggerating more than a little there, Neo. None of the bosses in Terraria were "I walk into you" with nothing else going on (none of them even walked, iirc, unless you count the invasions.), and only a particular subset of the enemies (Melee variations -- zombies, skeletons, possessed armors, werewolves... guess some of the goblins/snowmen would count there, too.) were like that without any notable variation (slimes jumped around, bats flew, chaos elementals did their little teleport thing, etc.). A majority was trying to collide with you to do damage, yes, but that kinda' describes the attack method of probably >75% of enemies in the platforming genre as a whole. With everything else, there was by and large as much variation in enemy attack and movement pattern as, well, many of the greats in the past. Most of the marios, just as an example, especially SNES era backwards. And seeing the edit... yeah, megaman, too. Most things either shot at you or tried to slam into you. Terraria kinda' covered that, too. MMX, at least, had a greater degree of bullet pattern variation, sure, but... not terribly much beyond that, in comparison, at least for normal stage enemies. Bosses were somewhat more involved, but to a large extent that was due to having a set arena. With that latter case in relation to Starbound... we'll see. They definitely seem more willing to use set pieces alongside and to enhance the procedural stuff (which, hey, roguelike ethos. I'm down with vaults.), which might leave room for some more environmentally involved enemies. There's been absolutely no suggestion there will be, though.
Terraria definitely could have been spruced up with some extra attack/bullet patterns and probably some more interesting movement patterns (wall crawling/bouncing, etc. I'm reminded of sting chameleon. Should steal that, heh.), but it honestly wasn't too far out of line with a great deal of the platforming genre, and pretty fancy in some places (wall fight and most of the hard mode bosses, ferex.). I've played many good platformers and a fair chunk of pretty terrible ones, and t'me T's platforming aspect was, well, better than many, if not most. Solid. Improvable (it's certainly leaning toward the simplistic side, but hell, it's more complex in that arena than, say, SMB1, which is pretty darn impressive for what was mostly a one man project.), definitely (what isn't?), but solid.
As for Starbound, we can be relatively certain that there'll be more movement types and attack patterns than T had, governed strongly by the procedural systems in place (though barring the set critters, whatever those end up being). I'm currently guessing we're going to see something along the lines of what (to use a relatively recent example I'm aware of) Magicmaker does with its bosses, where varying components of the critters definite how they act, drawing from a bit of a pool and quite possibly on the guns bullet/firing style patterns. We don't really know yet (unless a recent stream was particularly illuminating), though, so far as I'm aware. I've personally noticed a couple of attack patterns (ramming, short-ranged thrust) and one movement style (walking with a little jumping), which is pretty limited but noted as one of the things they're working on and intending to improve before release. We'll have to wait and see, yeah.
