Biological "Drones"

This isn't really an individual drone suggestion as much as it a mechanic, so I'm posting it out of the megathread.

Biological drones would be a sort of animal that would follow you around (for example, baby jellyfish) and would relate to an enemy or boss. They would mimic the abilities of their larger counterparts (in the case of baby jellyfish, fly, touch, sting) but directed toward enemies. Biological drones would be have stronger attacks and more health than current drones, but cannot be repaired. Biological drones would be gained after defeating the boss it is modeled after or opening containers and chests.

 

D'awwww!
I can imagine a tiny lemurian sitting on the commando's shoulder like a parrot.
Interesting idea, but it sounds like it'd be kinda animation and coding-intensive.

Edit: also, how would Arms Race interact with it? Baby crab dude gets rocket pods?

 

That's why we do the common sense thing and call them pets and not drones.

 

Yeah that would be the coolest reward for finishing super difficult modes and things late game. Purely aesthetic pets that are miniature enemy types.

 

The question with miniature enemies is how small the sprites already are. Given I think the game art is made 1-to-1 and then scaled up for larger screens/windows, I don't think they can just take an existing sprite and shrink it to make a 'smaller version', and there might not be enough pixels to make anything smaller than the human-sized player characters while still being recognizable as what enemies they're meant to represent.

I think jellyfish might be the easiest to implement, and maybe just sub in the imp children for black imps, and enemies that are by default much larger than the player character and wouldn't have to scale down as much (golems and crabs), but other mobs are visually optimized with as few pixels as possible and going less than that will lose a significant amount of character.

Not that I don't like the idea. I LOVE pets in games. I'm just not sure how it'd work out with this already fairly minimalistic spriting style.

 

I would think that they couldn't be repaired, but slowly regenerate health. Since they're alive, and all. I still don't quite understand why regular drones have regen.

 

I always just thought they self-repaired slowly with scraps, since I imagine a giant space-train exploding hard enough to send chests of volatile artifacts all over and even inside the planet would leave a lot of scraps about. Also, "Batteries Not Included" was one of my favorite movies as a kid (even though they never necessarily repaired themselves, but could repair one another), hahaha.

Worse case scenario, FUTURE MAGIC SCIENCE.

 

I know this isn't the same thing, but there's something similar for the imp overlords "unique" drop. The imp overlord tentacle gives you a little pet black imp. ya, impy. Aside from the mentioned above, this'd be awesome.

 

Maybe I should revise the idea to help with spriting. These pets will only be smaller versions of bosses in the case of most bosses (like the Magma Worm, Toxic Beast, and Vagrant), but for other bosses (only example I can think of is the Colossus) it could be a piece of the boss like a Colossus eye chunk or something.

And

Good point, they should regenerate quickly, especially out of combat.

 

Oh, my god - a Colossus's left arm on my Han-D would make him look freaking epic.