Today I took a little break from ground monsters to work on everyone’s favorite part of the game: birds! First, I replaced the current “swoop” attack with “dive bomb,” which is more effective in hitting players and also brings the monster within range of melee attacks. I tweaked the state behavior such that they tend to switch between dive bombing and ranged attacks so that even with the current, limited selection of attacks, combat feels much more dynamic and interesting. Next, I dug into their out-of-combat behavior. I re-enabled and improved several of their unused behavior states so that they will fly up, glide down, wander in different directions and even land on the ground to rest. There’s plenty of work left to do on these monsters, but they feel more lively now, and fighting them is actually fun!

Other than that, I’ve been continuing to improve ground monster behavior, fixing bugs, learning the game’s inner workings, and planning new additions to the Lua API. I’ll post more about my progress with ground monsters next week, so stay tuned and have a great weekend!