Because there was some confusion from our earlier posts on who we are and what we're doing here, we'd like to take the time to tell you a little bit about who we are, and what we're posting here on Destructoid.

Last June my brother Danny (GoS-CPT-Stewart) and I, Joey, premiered a mockumentary titled Super Ghosts 'n ... Ghosts? The movie is about our attempts to become amateur ghost hunters by traveling to several locations across the U.S. to see if we could actually find any ghosts (especially because we don't believe in them).

Now, Danny is attending Full Sail in Orlando, Florida for videogame programming and we decided that we were going to put his skills to the test and make a videogame, loosely, based on our movie. The game (Super Ghosts 'n ... Ghosts?: The Movie Colon The Game) is now in production for the XBOX 360 and PC platforms. We are using the Destructoid Community Blogs to showcase all the behind the scenes info about our game including what goes into it, how we made certain decisions, as well as updates to the game (images, videos, etc.)

We hope that cleared up any misunderstanding and we assure you that we are not spam, and we apologize if that is what you thought it was or how it came across. The Destructoid Community is a valuable tool and we do not want to anger or upset anyway. If we're stepping out of line please don't hesitate to contact us.

It is not our intent, nor will it ever be, to create information that is not relevant to our game. You can read all about what we're doing here and on our official websites. You can find links to them on the right side of the page.

Thanks,

Super Ghosts 'n ... Ghosts? Team

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We hope that you enjoyed Developer Diary #1 about our upcoming game Super Ghosts 'n ... Ghosts?: The Movie Colon The Game! We're back with another look into coming up with enemy ideas and how we try to fit classic enemies in with new twists.

Developer Diary #2: The Enemy of My Enemy is A Giant Octopus Wearing a Rainbow Afro

by Joey Rodriguez

Because most games tend to take place in a relatively current or realistic environment they are sometimes limited to enemy choices. Game such as Call of Duty or Medal of Honor take place in specific eras, decades, or years limiting to them to, if taking place in 1943 for instance, German, Japanese, and maybe Italian enemies. And even at that, every other enemy is really just another human with a different look. You're not fighting Germans and then Molemen, for instance. Their intent is realism.

Role-Playing Games are granted a wider range of varied enemies mostly because they are set in fictional times, areas, universes, whatever. A lot of times though the enemy really doesn't matter, the design that is. You may be fighting a dragon one instance and a giant tank the next, but because a lot of these games depend on turn-based attacks or gameplay it could really be any enemy staring you back in the face. Most of their attacks tend to be large physical attacks or magical attacks with, sometimes, no rhyme or reason for a particular skill or attribute. Why can a giant toad attack you with robots without any reason? Well, it's fantasy, deal with it. If the game explained to me that maybe the toad was a robot himself or he had robot masters then I'd play along. But because the game might take things a little too seriously sometimes in ends up just confusing us (by "us" I mean myself and Danny. This article is in no way meant to represent what anyone but us thinks).

From the beginning we knew that because we were over exaggerating the style and story of our game, that we could pretty much do whatever we wanted and get away with it. From the outset it is no mystery what the content of the game will be. As our last Developer Diary stated, fun and ridiculousness outweigh realism and attention to detail.

Our biggest challenge was creating enemies that were justified, yet still wacky. So we made a list of enemies that are classic not only to games, but film as well.


- Zombies
- Ninjas
- Pirates
- Robots
- Aliens

Then we came up with some enemies that were, though well known, not exactly the best or coolest to have as enemies in a game:

- Giant Bugs
- Werewolves
- Vampires
- Mummies
- Skeletons

We had a hard time deciding if the game should involve just ghosts, I mean the movie is about ghost hunting, or if we should completely nose dive. We could go the Call of Duty (for arguments sake) route and center on a specific enemy and make the objectives and gameplay overshadow the enemy. But in a 2D side-scrolling game there is very little to do in terms of objectives, especially when your main combat is blowing up everything on screen as fast as possible.

We could go the Role-Playing Game route and just throw everything but the kitchen sink in there and then just not justify it. But we had 12 different levels that varied greatly from the last, could we stick in the giant toad spitting out robots inside of a haunted house and have it be funny and cool at the same time?

So we decided to combine both ideas. Because each level takes place in a specific location (Sorrel-Weed House, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, The Bone Church) we could put different enemies into each level (Call of Duty) and before it got old you're already on to a new one. It was just a matter of matching the enemies up with a location. Well, The Bone Church could have skeletons and the Fishing Docks could have the Pirates and so on.

However, after about level 5 we realized that things weren't matching up so good. We were kind of stretching things out. Alabama's Sloss Furnace could have werewolves because...there's a full moon...and steel...did they have silver there? No...

We realized that, at least in our minds, we were granted a little leeway with making the game a little more out there because of our ridiculous, barely strung together plot. So we came to a compromise. We'll put all the enemies into the level they most closely fit first and then randomly throw in the rest and we could rewrite the script to accommodate the changes. Because we had not started the coding aspect of the game, changes like this were easy to make and more appropriate in the game development timeline.

Borrowing from both genres of games, First Person Shooters and Role-Playing Games, allowed us to better craft justification for certain enemies as well as writing the story to convince the player that the already ridiculous nature of the game COULD lead to robot, monkey butlers named Jeeves.

Ranks

We now had all 12 different enemy types assigned to each of our twelve levels. But would the player enjoy shooting the same generic zombies or werewolf for over an hour on a particular level? We had to expand, there had to be variations, but what kind? We debated how many different styles of one enemy there could be on a level. Finally settling on three ranks for each enemy we could now have 36 different enemy types plus 12 different bosses, so 48 variations in all. Certainly a lot of variation but not so much that the player would only see what kind of enemy once.

How could we differentiate inside of one class of enemies? Each enemy was different, with a unique set of attacks. For this example I will be using the Pirate enemy class.

Rank 1: Fat Pirate with Sword

From watching a lot of cartoons about pirates we noticed that there is always that token fat pirate who is rather lazy or hilarious as he waddles toward battle. We decided he would be Rank 1, or the easiest of the pirate class. There would be variations, artistically, to his outer image such as shirt color, presence of beard, skin tone, pirate hat, peg leg etc. In all there could be tons of variations, and at most there will be around 7 or 8 different looking pirates in Rank 1. His attacks could range from a belly hit to his rusty sword, simple yet hard to block or avoid.

Rank 2: Giant, Human-Sized Parrot with a little pirate that sits on his shoulder holding a tiny rocket launcher

Really the next step up from a fat pirate is either a thin or muscular pirate. So we thought what if it's the captain? Well the captain still has the same moves as the fat pirate, he swings his sword around. Well what about a captain with a parrot that does something? Well, the parrot is pretty lame as it is, what could it do? Poop on you? So we thought what if we switch roles? What if the parrot is huge and can hit you with it's wing or flap them to create wind to push you back? Perfect. But what about the pirate? Well, shrink him down and sit him on the parrot's shoulder as if HE was the parrot. What does he do? Rocket Launcher? Perfect. Visual variations could include accessories of the parrot, number of pirates on his shoulder or even the color of the parrot itself.

Rank 3: Pirate with two peg legs and a jet pack.

After the giant parrot we were pretty stumped. What could be funny, still stay in the realm of pirate but add that last little bit that puts him over the top as the hardest enemy variation? Jet pack, of course. After burner attacks, picking the player up and slamming him down and the potential to blow up the jet pack into a radial explosion were just to awesome to pass up. Put a sword in his hands or some grenades and he was ready to become a pest and a hilarious enemy.


We were able to differentiate one enemy class (First Person Shooters) from itself by going outside the norm (Role-Playing Games) and bounding it to the already wide universe we had created.

There you have it, easy huh? Not really, it took us three weeks to come up with our 48 enemy list, but it was fun because each idea topped the last. We'd like to think that nothing is set in stone when making a game and welcome the idea that creativity can easily overshadow realism, and vice versa.