Small Crab
Core Role: The roster's baseline melee grunt and the game's teaching enemy. It exists to be readable, beatable by every tool the duo has, and safe to place in numbers. If a player cannot beat a Small Crab, the encounter is at fault, not them.
🎮 Combat Design
Behaviour loop: the standard melee graph: patrol or idle → chase → windup → swing → recover → chase, breaking off and walking home when leashed.
| Property | Intent |
|---|---|
| Health | 1 hit. It dies to anything: spin, slam, roll, peck, dive, bubble, tornado. |
| Threat | 1 damage on contact with its claw swing, plus a slight knockback (~3), enough to interrupt, not enough to throw the player off a ledge. |
| Telegraph | The shared 0.6s windup with an attack alert popup above its head. |
| Punish window | The shared 1.9s recovery. Generous by design. |
Stomp: the pogo
The Small Crab uses the Kickoff Bounce stomp response. Landing on it launches the player back up with no damage in either direction, and the crab squashes and rebounds underneath them.
This makes a line of Small Crabs a traversal element as well as a combat one. A gap that is too wide for Koopa becomes crossable if there are crabs in it, and chained kickoffs are a legitimate route.
Every tool works on it
The Small Crab is the enemy where all the reaction components are switched on at once: it is bubble-capturable, tornado-able, stompable, and killable by any melee. That is deliberate: it is the sandbox on which the player discovers what their abilities do to enemies.
🗺️ Placement Guidance
- Groups, not singles. One Small Crab is a speed bump; four is an encounter. They are tuned to be fought in clusters.
- The introduction enemy. First appearance should be in the open, on flat ground, with nothing else demanding attention; see Area 1 Level 1 - Sandy Shores - Sunwash Beach Scene 3, where a squad of them guards the first caged baby turtle.
- Patrol routes. A crab pacing a stretch of beach telegraphs an encounter before the player walks into it.
🧪 Variants
- Bubble Crab: a Small Crab built around the bubble interaction.
- Patrol-only: a crab that never aggros. Set dressing, and a safe first sighting.
🔗 Related
- Systems - Enemy AI Framework: the shared behaviour core, tuning vocabulary and reaction rules
- Area 1 - Sandy Shores