@Falcata
you mentioned that this enemy leaves behind a trail of lava ... this gave me an idea. instead of spawning new living lava sprites why don't these trails left behind eventually turn into new living lavas. in other words, instead of having a new lava appear out of thin air when its spawned, make these tracks be the new spawns in an unattackable/unattacking form.
this could be an interesting concept when applied to other monsters too. like say there's a totem pole monster, and when you defeat it breaks into sections, and each section is a new enemy. or an energy ball creature that's big and when its defeated it breaks into smaller balls. or maybe there's a bird enemy that lays eggs, and these eggs will eventually hatch and turn into new spawns.
You would have to take care of the resulting exponential growth rate of the monsters somehow.
former Manasource Programmer
former TMW Pixel artist
NOT a game master
Please do not send me any inquiries regarding player accounts on TMW.
You might have heard a certain rumor about me. This rumor is completely false. You might also have heard the other rumor about me. This rumor is 100% accurate.
Exponential growth is what happens when you have monsters that generate monsters that generate monsters.
When every monster creates a new monster every, let's say, one minute and the newly created monsters immediately start to create new monsters themself, this means that the number of monsters doubles every minute.
When you start with one monster, you got 2 after a minute.
The next minute you got 4
After 3 minutes you got 8
After 4 minutes 16
5 minutes 32
Do you know how many monsters you have when you leave them unattended for an hour?
I'll tell you. 2^60 = 1.152.921.504.606.846.976
former Manasource Programmer
former TMW Pixel artist
NOT a game master
Please do not send me any inquiries regarding player accounts on TMW.
You might have heard a certain rumor about me. This rumor is completely false. You might also have heard the other rumor about me. This rumor is 100% accurate.
gotcha ...
actually i was thinking that it would just be the way the server spawned enemies, as opposed to them just appearing out of thin air. whenever the enemy count fell below a certain value (as compared to players on the map), the server looked for an enemy with in range of the largest group of players and gave that enemy a spawn() command, which would be a function in each enemies source that told it how to spawn, whether it would break apart or lay an egg or whatever. as opposed to just a loop that the enemy always spawns a certain time after it is spawned, which i think is what you're thinking. i don't know, i just thought it would be an interesting twist on the spawning approach.
crush, i had an idea about my spawning proposal. since you worried about exponential growth, what if only certain monsters could spawn non-reproducing monsters. example: large maggot can spawn little maggots but little maggots can't reproduce. so if you kill the large maggot there will be no more baby maggots.
The santa slime works a bit differently. It has a fixed number of minion monsters that follow it.
former Manasource Programmer
former TMW Pixel artist
NOT a game master
Please do not send me any inquiries regarding player accounts on TMW.
You might have heard a certain rumor about me. This rumor is completely false. You might also have heard the other rumor about me. This rumor is 100% accurate.