finalbossblues

Monster Monday 12: Spinning Turtle

Added 2024-08-26 15:59:01 +0000 UTC

Hello! It's Monster Monday! And today is the final release in our special summer event:

Today's monster follows the same trend of many of the monsters I've released in this series: it's intended to be a regular enemy, designed with versatility so you can potentially use these assets to make multiple monsters. The idea is to maximize the gameplay potential!

This is the spinning snapping turtle, and he can be used in multiple ways:

So-- for my final release of this event, my original idea was to make something really huge and impressive-- I started to make a fire-breathing raptor dinosaur, and I even wanted to his animations work for all eight directions-- but (to be transparent) I really struggled with conceptualizing the animations for multiple directions, specifically with how they would be able to function in a game with consistent hitboxes.

After spending a lot of time on that but getting nowhere... I decided to go in a different direction for today's release. I didn't want to delay the final Summer Monster release, and there's no shortage of ideas for regular monsters-- so we're going to save the raptor for a potential future release... once I figure out how to make him work, we'll make use of him for the boss series. 😚

With the raptor put aside then, let's take a look at today's spinning turtle:

He's not very flashy, but this is the kind of bread-and-butter enemy that this monster series is all about.

This is another sprite designed to maximize potential gameplay behaviors. There are three main animations here, and there's a bunch of ways we can use them in different combinations.

The first animation is very simple: it's a two frame spinning animation-- flick between those two frames rapidly and it will look like the turtle is spinning while withdrawn into his shell.

Then there's two other animations that work with that. Both of these animations are four frames long, and they can work in reverse order (so eight frames total if you play it back)-- the first one is the emerge/withdraw animation, and the second one is a mouth-opening animation. Both of these animations work for four directions.

Here's my suggestions on how to use them:

The animations are in four directions for a reason-- I figured that we can maximize the turtle-spinning behavior by having his direction randomize when he stops: the player might need to whack him on the head, so you'll have to use some clever positioning to get to the weak spot.

And depending on how you implement it, maybe the player could knock his limbs or tail too. Note that the animations are set up in a way where you could potentially crop them or split them into specific segments, so the head or limbs might not need to all come out of the shell at the same time-- if you want to use them in your game that way, there's a lot more options for making a thoughtful enemy encounter.

The "mouth opening" animation has two potential uses: first is the more obvious: it can be played quickly as a bite attack. Maybe more interestingly, we can have the turtle emit some sort of projectile or hazard. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love the limitless potential that projectiles can provide for creating different patterns and enemy variants.

You could also go even further by having the spinning shell emit some sort of elemental hazard too!

Personally I'd take advantage of this to create multiple enemy variants that could be used in different biomes throughout the game. I've included three different colors for just this use-- you can see the red one breathing fire in my example gif above!

I hope you can make a lot of use out of today's sprites-- add more gameplay to your world with a new turtle enemy... or three!

Downloads:

Reminder for RPG Maker users: Like my previous releases in this series, the of the animations are arranged vertically on the sheet. You'll need to animate it manually in the engine by changing the facing direction.

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Previous Summer of Monster releases: