Hiya! I read your tips on Time to Kill for enemy design, and you may have answered a similar question already, but how much damage should an enemy deal to the player? (Love your blog, btw, just found it!)
[Click here] to read about Time to Kill as a design principle.
You should generally consider enemy damage using the same principles as the “Time to Kill” for enemy design - the core question is “How do I want the player to feel when fighting this enemy?” which then breaks down into a different (albeit similar) set of questions as time to kill. It’s important to view combat damage toward the player on the basis of an entire encounter, rather than on an individual enemy-by-enemy basis unless the common encounters are typically single enemies. However, a savvy designer should consider all of the other details that bring additional context to combat beyond just how long it takes for a player to die.
Remember how I mentioned that the amount of time an enemy can survive player attacks is proportionate to how tough the player perceives the enemy to be? Well, the damage the enemy deals to the player also provides a lot of context to the encounter as well. Not all enemies are the same. The attack rate (number of attacks per time frame), damage per hit, and even visual context should be used to convey context to the player as to who and what they are fighting. Let me give you some examples.
Consider this first example enemy just from a visual perspective. She’s small, lanky, and evocative of an insect. One would not expect huge, slow, powerful hits from her. Instead, one would expect many small and fast hits that add up in damage over time, similar to our natural understanding of a swarm of insects. Adding status effects or a different damage type (e.g. poison) to this enemy would make perfect sense. I would expect to see a combat encounter with multiples of these enemies, lending more credence to the “insect swarm” theme.
Let’s contrast against this second example enemy. Visually speaking, this character is big, beefy, and notably slower in the idle sequence than the bee above. He is much larger and much more muscular, which suggests this enemy will hit very hard but also very slowly. The visual context here also implies primarily physical damage, but the Frankenstein’s monster aesthetic may also suggest electrical damage and effects because of the popular culture representation of this creature. This enemy would likely be a boss or a mini-boss and encountered by itself or in very small numbers.
Both of these enemies may take the exact same time to kill a player, but the way in which they deal the damage provides additional context to the combat encounter and teaches the player about this kind of enemy and the world they inhabit. This is important to keep in mind when considering player Time to Die and designing a combat encounter.
This is only scratching the surface - there’s a lot of additional elements to consider when manipulating how taking damage makes the player feel. Consider how the amount of damage doesn’t technically matter so much after a certain point as how long it takes for the player to die, but still feels different. If the player has 100 health and takes two hits that deal 50 damage over three seconds, that player has three seconds to death. If the same player with the same 100 health takes two hits that deal 99 damage over those same three seconds, that player still takes exactly three seconds before death. In both cases, the player takes two hits and dies - functionally, there is no difference between them. However, the hits feel much more dangerous in the second case despite the time before death being the exact same in both situations. This is a tool we can use to make an enemy seem more threatening to the player.
I could continue on for hours about other aspects of how taking damage in combat can be tweaked and adjusted to craft different experiences for players, but I think you get the idea. Combat in games is a means by which designers can craft interesting experiences for the player and provide context for the setting and world in which the game takes place. The thousand little adjustments we make aggregate to influence how the player feels and conveys important contextual information to the player implicitly. It’s a really interesting set of problems to solve, which is why I like working on this stuff.
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