Good day, everyone! I'm here with another devlog for our design choices in Song of the Bereaved.

This time, I'm going to tell how we design the monsters, both for the enemies and the allies.

The Monster (Enemies)

First, we start with the enemies. A game jam has a short development time, yet, we'd like to give some challenges to the players. Our common formula for designing the enemies is to have them excel in one thing. For example, if we have stats for speed, then we'd like to have a type of enemy that is fast.

So, based on the stats we have in Song of the Bereaved, we decided to have 3 types of enemies; Speed, Tank, and Attacker.

After deciding the types of enemies, we started on the visual. We picked some features that represent their specialty. For speed type, we picked wings and somewhat a thin body; For tank type, we picked shell; And for attacker type, we picked big claws.

Then the artist started sketching. Some other key points are; that the enemies need to be corrupted; the features need to be able to be seen from the side view.

Here's the artist's rendition based on the decision above.

All of them look corrupted and definitely dangerous. Players should also be able to tell the specialty of each monster. And all of them would have different silhouettes when they got made into sprites.

The Familiar (Allies)

Then, next, we started to design the monster for the player. Or as we call them familiars. These familiars will be summoned by the main character to help them in battle. The familiars gain power from the main character almost the same as how the enemies gain power from the last boss. They both infused their power into other things. The main character, however, infused it with their allies.

We then decided the type of the familiars the same way as the enemies; speed, defense, and attacker. The differences are that the familiars will have animal features that represent their types, and also the features of the main character.

So, from several animals we picked, we decided; that the speed type will be a fusion between blue jay with wind element; the defense type will be a fusion between armadillo or hedgehog with rock element; the attacker type will be a fusion between panther and fire element.

There is no artist rendition yet, but I'll be sure to keep you updated.

It was a great learning discussion for all of us on the team, and hopefully, you can learn a thing or two from this.

Thank you for reading, and don't forget to check out the game!

See you on the next blog!

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