Enemy Combat FUNDAMENTALS!

Enemy Combat Design I

This is the first essay series for Signals and Light, and it provides an overview of enemy combat design in action games. It is written from the perspective of a AAA game designer who works with enemies in action games and aims to pay it forward with what he’s learned.

The first part of this enemy combat series establishes the fundamentals: what IS enemy combat design, really? From the initial premises here, the next five parts cover the terms and tools in more detail to answer questions like…

• Part 2 - How are the phases of an enemy attack described?

• Part 3 - When an enemy suddenly attacks after blocking the player’s hits, what’s causing them to make that decision?

• Part 4 - When a boss jumps across the arena to hit the player with their huge sword, how does the game make this work in a polished way?

• Part 5 - When a player is overwhelmed by many enemy attacks, what’s happening behind the scenes to control that?

• Part 6 - When a player gets shot from off-screen over and over again, why does that happen and how can games make that manageable?

Getting shot in the back every once in a while is inevitable in an intense action game, but when enemies attack from off-screen as much as, or even MORE THAN, on-screen, a player might wonder what the game designers intended. Is it the entities that the player can SEE that matter most, or is it the player’s meta-awareness of all entities in the arena that matters most? SHOULD it be one way or another?

Rather than proposing objective or subjective answers to that question, the thought arises…What does it actually MEAN when a combat designer talks about this topic? What is this topic even called, and how is it discussed? This essay proposes the term…

“Enemy Attack Cadence.”

While this isn’t an official term used by game developers, it is one proposed to help clarify and understand how enemy attacks work and how to talk about the gameplay systems that make them work and make them understandable by players.

This essay is split into multiple parts that break the topic down one piece at a time. The essay won’t just talk about getting hit in the back but rather cover what enemy attack cadence is across the board and analyze all of the ways that different kinds of video games approach it. From these pieces of analysis, the game developers and gamers in the audience should be able to clarify some of their own ideas about what they think is fun or important in the combat design of the action games that they play.

I-A - what is enemy attack cadence?

While the word “cadence” sounds like it's referring to just the TIMING of attacks, this essay proposes that it defines the number, frequency, and basic properties of incoming enemy attacks in an action video game. To analyze this topic, it makes sense to distill it to its core high-level categories, or, rather…PILLARS!

The proposed four PILLARS of enemy attack cadence are:

• TIMING

• PROXIMITY

• CONCURRENCY

• DIRECTION

TIMING refers to the rate at which one or more enemies activate attacks. PROXIMITY refers to how close the enemy is to the player when the attack activates, and it also captures the difference between melee, ranged, and area-of-effect attacks. CONCURRENCY refers to how many enemy attacks may execute against the player simultaneously. Lastly, DIRECTION refers to where the attacks are coming from relative to the player’s position and camera view.

I-B - why talk about enemy attack cadence?

While it might be cool or exciting to talk about the best individual attack animations in various outstandingly good action games, these are relatively easy for a player to observe and understand themselves just through playing. What’s much less obvious are the systems that function behind the scenes allowing the overall experience of enemy attacks and combat encounters to become more or less enjoyable.

Most game players and even many game developers take enemy attack cadence for granted. It is a fundamental aspect of all video games that include combat, but it's something that’s often outside of the player’s control, giving texture to combat without drawing attention to itself. While it may be easy to learn the timings of a punishing boss attack string to block and dodge the absolutely ridiculous fake-outs at all the right times, it's not so easy to notice exactly how many enemies swing their swords or shoot their guns at once and the rate at which they do so. 

In games with large encounters, enemy attack cadence becomes more of a FEELING, something a player grows accustomed to over tens or hundreds of hours. Even highly skilled players probably can’t quantify the number of seconds between enemy attacks, the number of enemies that attack at the same time, and the circumstances in which they choose to. However, as a result of this texture, players eventually learn what their ideal actions SHOULD be. What’s interesting about the texture of attack cadence, though, is that it is objective. It’s a series of systems and algorithms programmed to work in an authored way, even if there are also always random numbers involved.

Much of this essay will be of the highest value to game developers, particularly aspiring combat designers or gameplay programmers. Many of the ideas in this survey are not immediately obvious when just playing games, and some utilize solutions one can only learn on the job or from GDC talks. (Also, of note, the whole career path of “combat design” can be a matter of some luck, as aspiring combat designers can end up stuck in other design roles without a clear path to learn about combat development tools and enter this specific subfield).

But while this essay comes from the perspective of a combat designer who works on designing enemies and AI for action games, it should still be approachable to gamers who enjoy thinking about how games work.¹

The underlying premise here is that one’s enjoyment of media is SUBJECTIVE, but the building blocks that form the media are OBJECTIVE. This is what is meant in saying this channel analyzes formal principles. Sometimes, the better that one understands how those building blocks work and fit together, the clearer one’s mind can become about why one enjoys the things that they enjoy. 

Thank you for reading Signals and Light. Please share this with any folks you might know who are interested in media analysis or game design!

I-C - why with so many parts?

Video games have evolved a lot, but many of the evolutions in enemy attack cadence specifically are invisible to players despite defining the landscape within which those players enjoy killing hundreds of enemies.

And so, this essay sets out to do two major things. First, it creates a catalog of ALL the major tools in the toolbox that come together to make enemy attack cadence possible, including tools that players won’t be aware of that are hidden in behind-the-scenes systems. Second, it explains how developers use these tools and why a team uses them in those ways. While the uses might seem obvious on the surface, every tool has a handful of subtleties that can trip developers up, and many games struggle to find their best identity due to implementation losing sight of these subtleties.

However, let it be said that the goal here is not to establish authoritative design doctrine. This essay does not prescribe how games SHOULD work but instead studies and shares information about how they CAN work.

Enemy attack cadence touches on many, if not all, aspects of combat design. It links to enemy behavior and AI, helping to define the fundamental combat design of each enemy. But enemy design ties directly to player character design, and every aspect of enemy behavior creates a foil to the player’s actions. Beyond that, each element of enemy attack cadence ALSO has ramifications for the encounter design of enemy groups and the level design of combat arenas.

While combat can be reduced to pressing buttons to destroy game objects, the truth is that the medium of simulated game violence is a vast aesthetic space. There are so many ways to do it, and who enjoys which ways and why are questions that will never cease to have new answers. And so this essay is broken into seven parts. The next part will define a handful of core concepts that will help the subsequent parts make more sense. The parts after that will take each pillar of enemy attack cadence and dump out its whole toolbox. The breakdown of each pillar will lay out a framework for understanding how its tools work, how to talk about them, and how to apply them within different game contexts. 

After the essay has methodically emptied all of these toolboxes, the last part will present a handful of major takeaways regarding how designing, accounting for, and working around enemy attack cadence affects the overall design and development of action games.

1. NOTE: None of the content of this essay reflects the opinions, beliefs, or proprietary knowledge of the creator's current or previous employers. Everything in this essay is constituted of the creator's own personal opinions, and the presented information is a reflection of the creator's study of combat design and commonly understood touchpoints of standard industry information regarding game and combat development.