The Mana World Forums

Len wrote:A floating eyeball seems a little generic to me
It might be fun to place it on a Player Sprite head and have it pulsate
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/136/3800 ... 05.jpg?v=0

Perhaps if the nerves are still attached to the back end it would seem less generic? If the nerves are long enough and touch the ground, they might even look like they are giving somewhat of support for the eyeball.

I have not done the back side yet, but I plan on extending the veins all the way around so they will meet in the back to be a big conglomerate of veins.

I felt like experimenting with the eyeball theme, too:

Just a quick hack-job to test the concept. I think it will be very easy to animate.

Background: Usually summoned by evil wizards as a guard creature. When it is summoned it stays stationary and observes the surrounding. The summoner may command the creature to contact him/her telepatically when it observes a specific event he/she described beforehand (like "someone comes through the door" or "the prisoners are no longer in the cell"). It can not decide on its own if an event is important enough to report it or not. So it will only inform its master when the event exactly matches the description. This allows smart adventurers who know the instructions to outsmart it.

Behavior: It attacks player characters on sight. Mid level version (Name: Spectator) is stationary. High level version (Name: Observer) is mobile but very slow moving.

Battle tactic: Attacks on long range with magic. When the enemy gets into melee range it bashes the enemy with the eyeball. This attack doesn't do much damage but pushes the enemy away and has a chance of causing status effects because of the creepy and disgusting experience of bouncing off a huge, wobbly eyeball.

That is awesome Crush! This is exactly what I was hoping for; something new innovative that has potential for new features in the future.

5t3v3 wrote:If the nerves are long enough and touch the ground, they might even look like they are giving somewhat of support for the eyeball.

Why not just make the nerves tentacles, give the thing a mouth and call it a beholder. Seriously though it's not bad, but I would tend to agree with Len that floating eyeball monsters are a bit generic. However, lots of the stuff that I've written so far has been intentionally generic.. so I suppose it's sort of fitting in that respect.

SoM had eyeball monsters, both stationary and floating.. "Eye Spy" summoned those Chobin guys and "Wizard Eye" moogled ya. I can't remember what the floating ones were called or what they did.

Maybe the veins should pulsate instead/as well? That might make it look more angry.

well as long as we're tossing in ideas, here's another one. the eye rolls over the ground, and makes 1/4th of a turn on each tile it moves, so if for example it moves towards you it only sees you once ever four tiles. When it does see you however, it gives you a tremendous amount of damage, perhaps even instant death? So when there's just one, it's very easy to avoid, but when there's more then one all moving in different directions, it's total chaos. One problem though might be by changing directions, the monster would have to turn on it's tile first, and only then start to move in another direction, otherwise rolling could sometimes stop to affect the position of the pupil. (for example if the eye faces south, and he suddenly moves west, then the eye would constantly face south)

Doing that does have other problems. If the eye moves less than four tiles (or anything not divisible by four) and stops, the pupil would move to face front even though thats not what should happen. It's a limitation of the animation system and fixing it would add unneeded complexity. A way around this would be to have six identical pupils so the effect would be unnoticeable.

jaxad0127 wrote:Doing that does have other problems. If the eye moves less than four tiles (or anything not divisible by four) and stops, the pupil would move to face front even though thats not what should happen. It's a limitation of the animation system and fixing it would add unneeded complexity. A way around this would be to have six identical pupils so the effect would be unnoticeable.

Having six pupils kind of defeats the purpose of making it fun to avoid them, because you would never be able to walk past them then and they'd cut you in. Also, not all four steps would be problematic, if the eye stops facing up or down, and then changes direction, it doesn't really provide a problem.

But either way, I was just brainstorming, throwing ideas, nothing that I would desire to push trough specifically.

I like the idea of creatures not being able to see you when you're out of their field of vision, but wouldn't that be something that could apply to any creature with eyes? Maybe exploiting a creature's field of vision is common and these eye monsters are nearly impossible to sneak past; being that the eye is obviously its dominant trait, shouldn't it be its greatest strength rather than its greatest weakness?

it's good work but yeah its kinda generic, many games have these eyeball monsters, like ragnarok online have eyeballs with wings and are called beholders...

When you have any more creative ideas then feel free to post them.

Actually to some extent everything has been done before (its going to resemble something), the important thing is to reinvent an old idea which Crush has done

Funny enough I happen to have drawn a floating eye monster a long long time ago. (It hasn't been modified since December of the year 2000! (I was 12!!))

Modanung wrote:Funny enough I happen to have drawn a floating eye monster a long long time ago. (It hasn't been modified since December of the year 2000! (I was 12!!))

Nice, (a little small but nice) but how does it attack?
Will it stare me down? hehe

// GonzoDark