he's in a giant wooden badger

trigger_centerprint_pythonquote 

that big motherfucking fish in HL1?
when you first met in in a crossbow cage, then again by the dam... 

see posts 32 and 38 

Bosses are best left customized by the designer to whatever he's building, yes. We see fewer bosses that way, but not every map needs one (some have them anyway!) and the ones we do are usually better for it. 

hmmm - spitting underwater?

Something scarier would be a squid or octopus, with tentacles that whip or grab, maybe a trilobite? 

the quake engine wouldn't be able to do it convincingly. heck, even modern engines would have a hell of a time with it. i guess it would be a mixture of standard animation, IK and some of the procedurally generated stuff that's starting to see some use in games these days. 

Psst...I know that...that's why I pointed out the suggestion had already been made much earlier in the thread 

... as I don't think people have really figured out the Quoth menagerie yet. Or at least I haven't. I had a strange sense of relief in Ruined Nation when I saw a shambler. "Ah!", I thought, "I know what to do here!", as I ran right up to him and did the double-barrel shotgun shambler dance. I don't have the same reflexes for, say, defenders, yet (my best approach so far is to run around like a headless chicken and take the odd potshot until they're gone). 

enemies that
hide and try to get in your back.
fly sideways while shooting at you in bursts.
have to kind of projectiles, like fast + slow.

homing missiles that have a max turning radius and are pretty fast so you can evade them by going sideways and then forward. 

Check out this water boss http://www.quaddicted.com/anaconda.html (not the one on the screenshot). 

Sorry to be a tad blunt, but you can blame necros for the earlier versions :P

That's not blunt - I'll happily blame necros :D

the Drole or whatever it's called

What is it with learning the names? It's written on the webpage. It's printed on the screen if one kills you. It's only five letters, and one syllable. Anyone would think you're trying to not learn them.

Ummm. Well I don't tend to read the webpage much....and I don't tend to get killed by Droles much... And I have a small brain that can only fit certain information in. 

shit me right up.

Wouldn't work very well on a modern alpha-vis'ed map though. 

I prefer the fast-bitey concept than the slow projectile thrower. Given that this monster is meant to dominate a large area of water, you can't allow the player to easily plug it from a distance while only having to dodge a few projectiles. It could make for a lot of quite easy fights, and make the player lose respect for the monster. Something is required with the immediacy of a fiend that takes the fight to the player.
It doesn't have to be much faster than the player or it could even be a bit slower, just as long as it gets to you quicker than those lazy rotfish.

I was planning a rotten, zombiesque version of a deep sea angler fish.

Heh, that's exactly what I imagined, I just couldn't remember what those things were called.

Also the vermis could make a good kraken-like underwater boss, maybe if it was adapted to grab and hold players instead of throwing them. 

You can vis liquids non-transparent. Transparent lava looks so silly... 

You can almost look at Quake as being like a 3D shmup like Contra, where it's all about finding the non-lethal places to be standing at any given instant. When you look at it that way, there's a whole range of attacks waiting to be tried.

That was pretty much my idea, I really think a lot of bullet patterns from 2d-shooters/Shoot 'em ups could work well in quake.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/bulletml/bulletml_applet_e.html 

I'm Not Sure We Need New Monsters Right Now
as I don't think people have really figured out the Quoth menagerie yet.

Yeah, you're right. Close the thread, we really shouldn't even be talking about this. 

I want
enemies that

hide and try to get in your back.

polyp


fly sideways while shooting at you in bursts.

polyp


have two kind of projectiles, like fast + slow.

got me there


homing missiles that have a max turning radius and are pretty fast so you can evade them by going sideways and then forward.

death lord
rocketeer 

i was going to say that ^^^^ ;)

i've noticed people not side stepping rocketeer rockets in demos for the maps i released. those rockets are very easily avoided, even in a completely barren room.
same thing with gaunts-- their lightning is easily avoided by just strafing.
out of curiosity, are those two things not readily apparent, and how can we communicate it better to the player? 

that's the sort of thing players just have to discover on their own. Isn't that part of the fun of meeting new baddies? 

I read the readme and use those techniques by habit now, but it's unrealistic to expect all players to be mappers.

Will say that consistently sidestepping the Gaunts lightning is made almost impossible because of its duration - you need a big open space to do it. 

Lun:

Well, that's a bit more negative that I meant it. But maybe we could talk about how to use quoth monsters effectively *as well*?

necros:

I've noticed that dodging rockeeter rockets isn't that hard. Hadn't noticed so much that dodging gaunt lightning was easy, I guess shamblers train you to not to try to dodge that sort of thing. Also, they don't seem to do that much damage, so I think I don't find taking the punishment while I'm killing them that bad. 

maybe it was a mistake to do the gaunt attack with lightning. i had a feeling about the shambler vs gaunt lightning attacks.

if you stand still, the gaunt's lightning actually does more damage than the shambler's (45 vs 30) but the damage is calculated dynamically based on how far it hit you from the player's origin, so if the lightning grazes you on the foot, it'll do about 1-5 damage. as long as you are dodging in at least some limited fashion the damage is reduced drastically.

i guess the problem is that this isn't communicated to the player. the tools to avoid/mitigate damage are there, but a typical player isn't aware of them. :( 

i had a feeling about the shambler vs gaunt lightning attacks.
that is to say, i had a feeling it would be brought up in this discussion. 

You need to teach these things to the player in a nice literal fashion. We've all been playing with Ogres and such for so long we've got them all figured out, but the new things take time, and Quoth by nature left that largely up to whoever built maps using those monsters first, the kelltestNs notwithstanding. I know the quoth monsters I've faced so far have all been in groups or mixed up with other monsters so there's no real chance to figure out the behavior for serious. 

we all learned how to fight the Quake monsters on small maps of 40 to 60 odd monsters each where you faced small groups of monsters. Most Quoth maps have been oriented towards horde combat making the adjustment a bit more difficult. Quake maps today are mere training grounds in comparison though there have been some really well balanced maps, Kell's first Quoth map (one with Red in the title, I think), for instance.