Bud
Core Role: A ranged plant that punishes standing still. It never touches the player; every threat it makes is a marked patch of ground that fills over a readable second, so the counter-play is always movement.
🎮 Combat Design
Behaviour loop:
Idle or Patrol → Attack Decision → Spin Volley (target close, off cooldown)
→ Aimed Lob (target at range, off cooldown)
→ close in / back off otherwiseBud kites: it backs away when crowded. It is the "keep your distance" enemy.
The two attacks
| Attack | Shape | Counter-play |
|---|---|---|
| Aimed Lob | One seed onto the player's current footprint, arcing high and slow, with a small scatter so repeated lobs don't stack in one spot. | Walk out of it. The seed does not track; the telegraph is the whole answer. |
| Spin Volley | A ring of seeds slung out of the spinning head cannon, landing evenly spaced around a centre biased from Bud toward the player. | The gaps between landings are the safe spots. Read the ring, stand in a gap. |
The landing ring
Every seed paints a ring on the ground where it will land, and the ring fills over exactly the seed's flight time. The player is never guessing: the ground tells them where the danger is and how long they have.
Flight time is the number that decides the whole enemy. Below roughly three-quarters of a second the telegraph stops being readable, and Bud stops being fair.
Vulnerability
No armour windows. Bud is a soft target: any hit interrupts whatever it was doing. The punish window is simply get to it between volleys, which is the mirror image of its own design: it punishes standing still, and it is punished by closing distance.
❓ Open Design Questions
Wildlife or crab fleet? Bud reads more naturally as something that simply lives on the shore than as a soldier taking orders. If so it is the game's first hostile wildlife, and worth establishing deliberately.
Rooted or mobile? A rooted Bud that cannot be escaped by walking away is a cleaner idea than a mobile one, and turns its kiting into a positioning puzzle rather than a chase.
🔗 Related
- Systems - Enemy AI Framework: the shared behaviour core and tuning vocabulary
- Area 1 - Sandy Shores