finalbossblues

Monster Monday 6: The Marauders (Patreon)

Published:

2024-07-08 15:59:01

Imported:

2024-07

Tags:

graphics

Content

Hello! I promised a big one for today's monster... here they are!

So imagine you're out exploring in the world, and you find a ransacked village. It seems that something horrible has happened here! But there's not a soul in sight... until you keep pressing further on...

Maybe you follow a trail that the culprits have left... and a few screens out into the wilderness, you stumble into a campsite... where-- sitting around their campfire-- you encounter the gang of villainous marauders!

These guys have a animation for sitting or napping, and when they are alerted to the player's presence, they have a snappy "wake up" animation. Then they can grab the nearest weapon and quickly hop into the fight!

Like the other monsters in this series, I have an extended recording that shows this behavior in slightly more detail than the above gif. Check it out here: webm gameplay video.

The thing that makes these marauders unique is that there's three variants: depending on which weapon they grab, their attack pattern might be different! There's a spear, sword, and a hammer.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to program in their attacks into my game prototype-- so that's why the gif (and the recorded webm preview) only show them waking up when you get within range.

Since I couldn't implement the attacks into the game, I exported a gif that shows some of the animations for the attacks:

(Note: There's animation for the same attack for the up-diagonal facing direction too. You can see them change directions while walking in the webm linked above)

The actual attack animations for each one are pretty much the same. I did this to make it easier to work with-- I imagine that in game, the differences would be in the timing of the attacks, or maybe the range and hitbox. I think that'll be a good way to get a lot of use out of this type of enemy, and makes them ideal as a recurring enemy faction that you encounter in different combinations throughout your game.

The marauders have a bunch of animations: primarily, they have idle, walk, and attack animations-- all with both north and south directions (which are designed to be flipped so they ca be used in the four-diagonal style of action combat). In addition, you've got two options for their "unaware" state: either simple sitting, or taking a nap. And a transition animation where they hop up into their idle stance-- this transition is also designed to look right if you pick up their weapon with it, so they can transition right into their weapon-holding animation.

For that to work, I've included the weapons themselves as simple single-frame objects. The idea is that the marauder stuck the blade into the ground next to him while taking a rest-- these guys don't take very good care of their things!

The weapons are only on the master sheet here, and not included on the RM format sheets, because it's up to you how best you want to use them. If you want to use them in RPG Maker, I think it will be pretty easy for you to crop them out of the master sheet and paste them into an existing tileset.

With that said-- let's move onto the Downloads:

RPG Maker Format:

I hope that you get a lot of use out of these!

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Previous Summer of Monster releases:

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This was a big one: I hope you can see why I was excited to share this one with you today! We'll have another monster next week, but maybe not quite as complex... Idk... I have a bunch of ideas written down-- we'll find out which one I feel like making next weekend!

In the meantime, I want a little break from animating... so I'll probably do something with tiles for the second release for this week-- I'll be back with that in a few days. See you soon.

Thanks!