ITT we design frustrating vidya enemies

ITT we design frustrating vidya enemies.

I'll start:
>runs faster than the player character

Melee enemy in an FPS

>steals your weapons and ammunition
>they are gone forever

>can destroy savepoints and savefiles

>has awesome loot
>has a tendency to fall down ledges before dying

>shoots projectiles at long-to-middle range
>projectiles track player movement
>projectiles slow the player
>slows stack
>melee attack instant-kills

>is invisible

> Enemy breaks apart into smaller versions of itself when hit
> Can reform back to larger version
> Always split vertically and instantly reform

>has an unblockable attack
>has an undodgeable attack
>both have no startup

>has a shield
>rarely drops his guard

>is the only enemy in the entire game that is either immune to magic or immune to physical making it impossible to progress if you're specialized only in one

>can summon itself, resulting in exponential growth
>fully regenerates its life within a few seconds

>steals your stats/items

fuck slark and the fuzzies from paper mario

>ignores the game's normal gameplay and throws you into an unforgiving no-mistake rhythm game with unreliable visual cues and varying rhythm through several phases

First versions of the enemy fight in a style similar to the player, except they aren't anywhere near as proficient. The next ones have fully analyzed your playing style and mimic it nearly flawlessly. The final version? These ones fight in a way perfectly designed to fuck your mouth. They've learned the counters to your moves and style as well as the attacks of your foes that you've struggled against.

>the only way to EVER hit the enemy is by hitting them during their own attack animation after evasion
>they almost don't attack and just wait till you do to fuck you over in the process

There was an SCP like that if I remember right

Drakengard 3?

Is in a 3d game, has only close-range attacks, does not have any attack animations.

>is invincible
>acts like he's taking damage
>conveys in no way to the player that he is invincible

>Is fucking huge compared to player
>Blocks every attack
>No push back
>You have to pass it to get to new areas

You just described every enemy in Minecraft.

I don't get it.

>carries loot vital for game progression
>designed to sprint off ledges upon approach, causing you to miss the loot
>never respawns

>knocks weapon out of your hands
>janky ass physics model causes weapon to fly off in to the aether, losing it forever
>attempting to draw a different weapon causes the exact same thing to happen
>all of the top-tier weapons are one-of-a-kind and extremely expensive

Fun fact, this is how they marketed the Necromorphs in Dead Space.

>"Oh, they totally learn your playstyle! They react differently depending on which weapons you've used, or how you've killed them previously!"
>gay baby falls off wall and sits still whilst shooting at you
>necromorph pops out of painfully obvious vent, vulnerable the entire time

Fuck video games.

Basically:
>stuns

>has a massive aoe attack thats nearly impossible to dodge

>in a top down game
>has an instakill attack which it can fire from offscreen
Oh wait, every enemy in Hotline Miami can do this.
Why did ANYONE think that was a good game?
It's not even that fast paced, and it's rather mindless once you get the hang of it.

>casts death spells

Can fly freely throughout the environment, is shaped like a blank sphere that constantly changes in size, and has no movement animations, making it impossible to judge its distance relative to you.

Learning AI is like the holy grail of AI.
But it won't happen soon because it's tough as balls to design a good interface that will allow it to learn well.

The closest thing we could get would be an AI that prefers to use the abilities that were effective the last time.
No fancy swarming or anything like that (that can't be learnable easily), just shit like
>use fireball if you can get player in AoE, but can't get him with a direct hit
>don't use lightning when you can use bow
>use lightning instead of bow if your last bow attack missed
This wouldn't be too strong of an AI, but would cause it to act differently based on player's actions and not just state.

It would be easier to just make it a pretty OK AI and then hide information from it when it is supposed to be weak and reveal more of it as it gets "stronger".

>Casts a status effect that will brick your console
>Only way to remove it is with an item paid with real money

>every attack procs poison that either takes forever to clear out or you need to use antidote every time you take a hit

Im looking at you Dark Messiah

Holy shit, I forgot about the spiders.

when they leap and you know you cant block/dodge in time

The only thing more memorable than spiders is kicking.
Forgetting spiders is like forgetting 30% of the game.

>has regenerating health
>has invincible phases

FUCK YOU REALM OF THE MAD GOD I WANT YOU TO FUCKING DIE.

That sounds as annoying as fuck but really cool.
Flying four-dimensional enemies would appear to change in size and shape as they moved, and a four dimensional sphere would be exactly what you described.

>enemy stunlocks you but does no damage
>is always with a group slow but heavy-hitting enemies.


A few games already do this

It summons a bunch of minions with slow poisoning attack then runs off to an unreachable high ground to spam aoe dot spells at you.

Emperor: Bttle for Dune is still the best RTS AI I ever played against.
If you turtle they just harass your harvesters and fuck your mouth with artillery.
If you try to harass their harvesters with stealth units they send a swarm of unit and scout every single inch of terrain ner the place you attacked them.
If you find a crack in their base defense and attack them there, the next time you get there it's fortified tenfold of hat it was.

Man do I miss old westwood.

There are a few games with learning bots already, some of those 2-D multiplayer shooters had bots that organically learned strats. They learned how to grenade jump on their own without any outside help.

The key to building good ai is measuring EVERYTHING and then deciding what constitutes improvement and what does not.

I could be pretentious and say "that's kinda the point" but I don't work at dennaton, so idk

Immune to criticals and sneak attacks.

>several enemies have a quick stun/knock-down with low CD
>they take turns knocking you to the ground
If it'd at least kill you, it's fine. But if it just draws out the fight with phases where you can't do anything it's just annoying as all hell

enemy is a shit fetish(cat girl, ogre etc.)
attacks have almost no audiovisual cue and can happen off screen
they are slippery as fuck and can use Iframes against you

There's a joke here somewhere, and I'm going to find it!

I want to forget them

Not sure it's feasible in normal games at all, because to teach an ai model you need a large sample first. One player playing the game is not nearly enough for the ai to learn anything at all. You could potentially have it learn from all the players playing the game world wide.

But then again if you teach a perfect ai (and you can, just look at that go machine) players will stand not a chance and who would want to play a game they are guaranteed to lose?

It's a lot of work to make an AI learn.
Most of the learning AIs are exploity bastards that know how to walljump and phase through walls, but lose focus as soon as they can't see the target.

Do you have a link to the grenade jump learning bots?

Immune to normal weapons altogether, only way is to kill it with a rare/expensive/finite item.

It's less about learning a whole game and more about adapting tactics.
Having an AI learn how to play the game from scratch would be a giant undertaking, easily more work than the rest of the game summed up.

You could still have an AI that learns to evaluate effectiveness of specific actions in specific context and even plan ahead.
For example, an AI could learn that it's a good idea to teleport towards the player if player is damaged and the AI has a stun attack that is about to go off cooldown. But then it could unlearn that if player exploits it to pull enemies one by one. And then it could re-learn that if it notices it works if entire group teleports at once.

State evaluation is a major part of AI and also one that can be learned pretty well.
Though it could easily make it very CPU costly.

I'd like to see a learning AI that's just trial-and-error combinations of NAND gates.
Actually, I could do this with cellular automata, but I'm feline lazy -w-

I remember that on Quake the bots eventually learned the only winning move was not to play. They'd all sit still and play for the draw.

that's unfortunately not true, carmack himself alongside with romero called it bullshit

an entertaining idea though

Hmm, I just did the math and there are 2^256 possible binary cellular automata that could result from that.
256 possible combinations of neighbours, and one bit representing the reaction to each combination.
Doesn't exactly require random combinations of NAND gates though, just 256 boolean values giving a reaction to each possible neighbour combination.

NAND alone would not be Turing complete, meaning it would always be deficient.
Neural networks could actually learn everything a human can, but human-like ones would need a supercomputer to run.

Still, a neural network can do just fine to assist a regular AI. Google's bot that played go used convnets to evaluate states and speed up monte carlo search of decision tree. The bot was better than any human player, despite go being considered a hard game for AI, unlike chess.

One of the biggest problems in AI is that it needs discrete states and in vidya you have continuous 3D space that doesn't translate well into discrete states.

Disregard the part about NAND gates, I fucked up there - they seem to be able to form Turing complete systems.

>causes a specific kind of poison damage that is different from regular poison.
>curing items for poison are common but ones for the special kind of poison are extremely rare.

>bullet sponge
>kills you with 2 hits
>faster than you
>can climb walls
>can go right throught the any obstacles(including trees, rocks, basically anything)
fucking bears in rust

>enemies die and regenerate
>they all need to be dead at the same time

>forced stealth section in a non-stealth game: the enemy
one of the few things bad about BFBB

Did you seriously not realise that you can look around?

>Enemy has a mechanic where if not seen by the player, can do 2 extra turns
>If an enemy is defeated, an enemy will take their extra turns

There, came up with the most annoying Civ enemy.

so crystal lizards?

>AI can do specific actions you can't do

>Moves faster than you
>But slows your movement speed when it gets close

Take pic related and give him Baron health

>Moves faster than you
>Attacks and stunlocks you even through blocks
>Reflects damage done to it so you will always lose health fighting it

>Stealth mobs "hidden" in plain sight
>You can't actually damage them untill after they jump off the wall they're on and land behind you

Pick one to make an annoyance, two for an eyesore, three for no fun allowed, or 4 for fuckmonster. 5+ for real soviet style gameplay.

>Stunning move
>At least two stunning moves
>Deals high damage
>difficult to escape
>spams instant death
>can steal your money/items
>gives shit exp/money
>In a game where actually killing enemies matters for exp purposes, is a teamkilling fucktard
>Attacks from an angle you cannot properly retaliate against
>No exploitable weakness, whether intentional or not
>Inflicts status ailments readily, draining your mp/items
>reflects damage it takes
>can make itself invincible for a length of time

>every attack has a chance to disarm you

>you need to waste 2 turns to pick your weapon up and quip it

>there is no guarantee you won't get disarmed while trying to equip your weapon

>Has invincibility periods
>Only vulnerable when it fires
>Moves sporadically
>Does damage on contact
>It's a damage sponge and you can't kill it within one opening
>Can reappear and disappear somewhere else
>There's no limit to how long it's gone for

>Has a jump attack that tracks you

>Hitting his shield costs extra stamina and forces you to recoil so he can counter hit for free

>Very small and fast enemy
>Can give lots of status ailments
>Common enemy
>Tends to appear on crowds

Forgot to add
>Has a long range attack

>Can lock you into frogs

...

>Slowly heals itself during cutscenes and all you can do is watch

WHATS THE FUCKING JOKE?

>Has high weapon vampyrism (Lifesteal/Lifelink)
>Progressively attacks faster as its health gets lower
>Gets a 15% HP shield when dropped to 1%
>Any remaining shield after five seconds is turned into health. Cooldown, 30 seconds

You get the loot even if it does fall down

>steals money/items
>difficult to escape
>inflicts status ailments
>gives shit exp/money
i'm a monster

In HM1 the maps were designed so that mostly wouldn't happen. In 2 they went full retard with huge ass corridors so you'd have to die a couple times then shoot at the far-away enemies from memory.

>every ability it uses triggers a 10 second cutscene
>there is a high chance that it will continue using abilities during the cutscene
>the cutscenes that should have played during the cutscene will play immediately after

Can't be stunned

Will stun you with an attack with no wind up

Inflicts status effect that terribly handicaps you but does almost nothing to the enemies

Has a very useful rare drop

Can only be damaged after it's stopped attacking
Has no set pattern, randomly attacks with nigh-insta-killing attacks that are difficult to dodge
Can stop you from acting with a specific attack
It can do this constantly if you've got bad RNG
If you hit it too often, it reprises and attacks almost instantaneously
guess who it is

>Has phases where it it invulnerable
>It's doesn't attack or anything during this phase
>You just have to wait it out

>moves and attacks faster than you
>has close to no cooldown between attacks, no opening
>every attack is a 3 to 5 hit combo with at least 1 360 hit
>tracks you as if it was standing on a rotating plate with no way of getting behind it
>its weapon has a much bigger hitbox than the size of the weapon
>makes stupid noises
>spams his combos even on your dead body

The destructors in one of the AC games?
First one is a tank, then a quad, then a biped and then a spidery monstrosity zipping everyfuckingwhere

Allow me to describe the G5F Wyveros on max difficulty:
>it's tiny
>and fast
>ridiculously fast
>if a competent player was flying this the only thing that could catch it would be an actual fighter, though we're talking about max difficulty AI here
>every ship that is as fast as this ship is like paper
>but this ship is a grappler so it not only has 6 shield slots, it can triple its hull resistance and quadruple its hull regen with just two pieces of equipment
>6 shield slots is just enough to equip flex shielding, which is perfect for grapplers that have a toughened hull; it trades off shield capacity for shield regen, which on most ships means you risk getting quickly killed since hulls are really weak, but when you cross a toughened hull with flex shielding, a heavy barrage of fire will have the shields take half the damage then the hull take the remainder, then both will quickly regenerate to full
>though it only takes about 650-750 damage to instakill a G5F with that loadout on normal difficulties, which spares you the issue of health regen
>but fucking max difficulty
>everything can survive several times as much damage thanks to extra health and damage resistance, which means that unless you can deal absurd amounts of damage in a short time (See: cloning the C5 Squid then having you and your two clones create a swirling mass of gravity and raw firepower) the G5F will often be healing itself faster than you can damage it, it can survive a few thousand raw damage and heals about 150 a second (1000 raw damage would be considered a devastating blow)
>so these things on max difficulty are so tough that sometimes it's better just to cripple them and run away before they recover

Yeah I remember this
What SCP?

I think it was the videogame one
>first time you play the ai is dumb as shit
>then it learns as you play (need to save and exit first)
>then it start using your personality (and glitches in the game) against you
>then the final boss rants about the player (not the character, the player at the keyboard)
>then it goes full Snowcrash on you by one of those "crash your mind into a vegetable" images

If the heavy duty clothes were generated based off of where you were shooting earlier in the game as opposed to just being pants it would be great.

not in the first two I don't think
kinda dumb that they do in DS3 as they just suicide jump off of most drops

Shrine of Amana?

there are no slow spells, that's the water

*slowing

draugr deathlord

In the tower of magic and tower of might you are supposed to use only the corresponding battle styles.

>has an attack that knocks you back to an earlier part of the level