Encounter design (Patreon)

This is the first time I've really worked with single player design and I wanted a starting point for the combat encounters so I've been really digging into Bethesda's titles.  There seems to be a clear evolution starting at Daggerfall and arriving at Skyrim and Fallout 4 in the way that the encounter design is handled.  I wouldn't be surprised if at Bethesda they even have a chart of different size levels of encounters.  

These seem to be the rules of thumb and have a lot of variation in application.

There's the one off encounters of walking on the road and a couple of wolves attack.  Then the next level of encounter would be roughly 3 fights that would usually escalate in difficulty and be set in a guard tower or small cave.  The first enemy is on the exterior and lets the player know what enemy type is in the cave, then inside of the cave there will be the middle section of enemies usually a group of 2, then the culmination of the cave and the "boss" encounter which could either be a single higher level enemy or mixed group of enemies.  The loot design also roughly follows this pattern and will be set with or directly after each enemy encounter.  The first loot is going to be random junk, then some mid tier stuff maybe a few weapons, and then there will generally be a treasure chest after the boss encounter.  

Using that as a starting point I began roughing out a guard tower interior and exterior on the road leading out of town.  I'm still experimenting with the AI behavior and the overall layout and design of the tower trying to figure out what types of spaces I need so the player can still maneuver but at the same time be pushed into the encounter.  

I also started working on the logic for the player after they've been defeated.  At the moment when the player hits the exit button after a defeat scene the screen will fade to black and then they will respawn in town.  I think I have it set up in such a way that this will be customizeable based upon who the player was defeated by and then what the impact of that defeat should be.  The initial feature will be similar to CoC where the player is defeated and they wake up back in camp missing a bit of money.  The plan is to make the system deeper sort of like Skyrim's death alternative mod, where there are a number of different outcomes after the player "dies".  

Hunted down a few bugs I saw posted.  The first person view losing blendshapes during scenes should be fixed now.  

Updated the NPC spawn point logic.  There's still the parent area that once the player crosses into they will spawn the characters inside of that area.  But now that spawner will support multiple locations with multiple actors across those locations.  Also when the player leaves the area it will trigger a short timer that will then despawn those characters and free up resources.  

Finally started the low poly for the Imp.  I should be doing the bakes later on tonight and then start texturing.