Castle Paradox

[Mr B]

I am having difficulty controlling how spawning behaves. (using the Rusalka release)

Here is my goal: when each enemy dies, I want it to spawn another enemy that is a skeleton of the parent enemy, which immediately dies as well. This will give the effect of the skeleton briefly appearing whenever a monster dies.

How do I make this happen? I always thought that a "spawn on death" enemy would spawn right into the parent's slot, but this doesn't seem to be happening.

Additionally, setting the spawned enemy's HP = 0 doesn't make it die immediately. I still have to kill it.

Additionally, the skeleton enemies the "not targetable by heroes" bitset does not make the battle end when every targetable enemy dies...it just sits there, waiting for me to target something and I can't target anything.

Any suggestions or advice?

[The Drizzle]

What you're trying to do with the skeletons is pretty tough, and i'm not sure if there's even a way to do it. New enemies always spawn in the first open slot, but you can pick where you want to place a spawned enemy by putting something in an open slot in the battle formation screen and moving it to the desired location.

As for the skeletons not dying immediately, you could try giving them a very high speed stat, then giving them one attack that makes them kill themselves.
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[Mr B]

Hmm...okay. However, didn't the zombies in Wandering Hamster respawn into the same slot?

Also, if there are no targetable enemies, isn't the battle supposed to end? I remember that it used to work like that.

[The Drizzle]

The way it was done in wandering hamster was as I described earlier. James put down 2 zombies in the same place using the first two open enemy slots, then he deleted one. When one died, it would spawn a new one in the next open spot which would be the same as the previous because he set it up to have two enemies in the same spot initially. If you try to do it with more than one enemy on the battle screen at the same time, the spawns could appear under the wrong enemy because they're only set up to spawn in the first open spot. It's kind of tough to explain.

And you're about battles usually ending when there are no targetable enemies, at least I think. But this might just be because they act differently because they're spawned. You might want to try this: Activate the boss bitset for all the "parent enemies," and activate the "Die without boss" bitset for all the skeletons. Rather than making them spawn, make them untargetable and place them directly under the enemy from the start of the battle. When the enemy is killed it will fade away, leaving only the skeleton. When all the enemies are killed, the skeletons will disappear.

I'm not 100% sure this will work because I think I remember someone saying once that if there are multiple bosses, any "die without bosses" enemies will die after the first one gets killed. But this is the only way I could think of doing it while still being able to have multiple enemies.
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My name is...
The shake-zula, the mic rulah, the old schoola, you wanna trip? I'll bring it to yah...

[msw188]

If you are not using them for anything else, I think that this can be done with Enemy Types, and/or Elements. It will be a serious pain, and you won't be able to ever have half of the available slots used for actual enemies.

If you are willing to let the skeletons sit (rather than fade away), then this can be done with a LOT of battle backdrops in the rather obvious way... in this case, it might be better to try to come up with a general 'remains' sort of picture that could be used under a variety of different enemies.

[Mike Caron]

Some time in the intermediate to far future, I will implement enemy transformations. That will allow a monster to transform into another one when a certain condition is met (HP and MP at first, probably). That would fit the bill quite nicely, I suspect.

Unfortunately, there's not much to be done about it now, other than what everyone else has said.
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[LeRoy_Leo]

[Mr B]

Okay, thanks. I'll just go for the easiest route and not have skeletons -- I'm trying to get the game DONE, so anything with a particularly high difficulty/reward ratio must go.

But thanks for the info -- I look forward to the enemy transformations.