Players will take on a variety of bug types throughout the game. Can you please describe their variances and your process for designing the game’s enemies?Sayre:
The core combat involves the player flipping over bugs by stunning them from the air, then pushing them off the level with a gust of wind that must be charged while on the ground. This sequence of swooping around the arena while airborne, then trying to find space to land and push bugs, is also what has dictated a lot of how the bugs are designed. There are smaller bugs who are solely focused on eating minerals, and you’ll need to keep away from the ones you want before they’re all eaten up.
After that, we designed bugs that generally fall into two categories: ground and air. One of the core bugs is called a Scissor Scarab, and if it catches you going after the same minerals that it wants, it will try to push you back. It does this by opening its pincers, waiting for you to land nearby, then lunging and biting your mech, knocking it across the level. This basically makes certain areas of the arena unsafe to land, making it important to choose carefully where you can charge your push ability, and is why we call them ground guards. Other bugs will defend mineral deposits in the air, which makes it unsafe to float around, and you’ll need to hit the deck in order to dodge their attacks, making it harder to continually stun bugs without getting hit.
The combination of various bugs that target different areas, close ground, distant air, etc, is what makes them all work well together. When we tried to come up with the various designs, it was all about diversity in the type of behavior and purpose of each one. Each buggo you’ll encounter is memorable, and often has a specific counter that you’ll want to use in order to deal with them quickly. The larger creatures can also often block attacks, and you’ll need to find their windows of vulnerability in order to flip them over, and eventually push them off the level.
Stonefly has a really interesting art style that is inspired by both mid-century modern design and the natural world. Did the project start with this art style or did it evolve over time?
Sayre: The art style of Stonefly has definitely evolved over time, as a combination of both previous look development we’ve done, and an effort to push forward into new territory. We started with some really striking concept art that established many of the textural qualities, and a lot of that can be seen directly in the backgrounds and in many of the shared properties of wood, grass, and other surfaces in the game. But there’s always an evolution that happens as we try to translate the concept from 2D to 3D, especially with lighting and other techniques that we establish along the way in how we design and author each asset.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog