I’m Albert A from the design crew. Today let’s talk about the Mimic!
The Mimic is a Guardian you can fight in the Derelict Starship. As Brendan was writing the story for Season 2, he came up with the idea of the Mimic, a formless alien creature made of liquid opal with the capability to morph their bodies into other forms. There were an abundance of inspirations we drew from, the T-100 from Terminator 2, Morph from Treasure Planet, Ben 10, and the art team went out to concept a rendition of a ‘shapeshifter’ creature.
The question was what would it do? Initially, we wanted the Mimic to be able to change shape into all of the current classes in the game. But as we drew it out, it became increasingly clear that it would have been too large of an undertaking. Each new form for the Mimic is akin to making an entirely new enemy – it would need its own concept, model, rig, and set of animations and abilities. So, instead we set out to limit it to 3 forms, Magma Miner, Mosscloak, and Weaver, the three starting classes in the game.
Designing what each form would do came down to 3 things:
- It needs to be reminiscent of the class it was playing, with identifiable moves as Bindings.
- It needs to have its own ‘spin’ on each of the Bindings to work as proper threat.
- It needs to shapeshift at some point during the combat. Otherwise, it wouldn’t feel like a ‘shapeshifter’.
So as the art team chugged along to get the Mimic in the game, I prototyped a placeholder asset with abilities. Having designed the starting 3 classes, it was nice to be able to sort of ‘recreate’ them in a different context. You couldn’t just plug in a player Binding to an enemy ability, each ‘Mimic Form’ would have to be its own iteration of each of the classes.
Magma Miner was the easiest to translate into an enemy, Bonk and Smash translate pretty well as direct attacks, and Leaping Strike just worked as a larger AOE. The main difference is, instead of gaining Heat only from attacking, the Mimic’s Magma Miner also gains Heat from being attacked, as a way to give the player agency during the fight.
Screenshot depicting the Mimic in Magma Miner form attacking playerMosscloak’s initial design was a bit different. The initial design revolved a bit more around Shuriken. Rather than doing a Flurry AOE attack, Mosscloak’s direct attack would hit 1 time for each stack of Shuriken. So if it had 3 Shuriken, it would multiattack three times. The reason we ultimately didn’t stick with the idea is because it didn’t jive too well with Evasive, there wasn’t a way we could make that interaction clear, and we had plans for the future to grey out direct attack arrows that were getting dodged, so it wasn’t clear how it would work with that system either. A big benefit with how it’s currently implemented is that it’s less direct-attack heavy, and probably resembles Mosscloak more than the initial design.
Screenshot depicting the Mimic in Weaver form attacking playerWe were inching closer to releasing the season, and we had a working prototype, but the art for the Mimic was still coming down the pipeline. Safe to say, we were getting pretty worried if we could get the Mimic to ‘work’ in time. Animation-wise, we hadn’t done anything like this before. Whether or not it would work out of the box was an open question…
The answer to that question was no, it would not work out of the box. In fact it was very broken, so broken that the enemy wouldn’t play any of its animations. Instead of walking it would slide across the battlefield like the silver surfer. So me and a bunch of other devs scrambled to try to find a fix. And we tried a lot of stuff, some of them would get one thing to work, but then cause the animation to break or start T-posing.
But thankfully after several discussions, we found a way to get it to work. The ultimate fix had to do with combining rigs together into one, and a bunch of other small things. Thanks to Griffin and Merlyn for getting the Mimic to work in the nick of time! Retrospectively there are a few things we could’ve done to smoothen the process a bit more, like shifting the Mimic further down the pipeline earlier, knowing that we were likely to run into problems out of the box.
In general, whenever you’re trying something new, you should always account for running into new problems. And, you need to weigh that with whether it’s worth the effort in trying to make that idea come to life. Sometimes, you might decide it isn’t worth the headache. But other times, if you have people who are excited about an idea, you go, “Why not?”.
I hope you guys enjoyed this deep dive in the process of making the Mimic, game development isn’t always a smooth ride, but it sure can be an interesting one.
