Enemies spanning multiple tiles

[bel]

(Played a lot of Bloodborne recently, and had some wacky ideas, which may or may not make sense in DCSS)

There are some enemies which span multiple tiles (for instance, tentacles from a Kraken), but the mechanic overall seems underused.

One could think of many variations on the basic concept; one could attack a limb to "stagger" monsters (a la Dark Souls/Bloodborne). Or there could be some kind of cool mechanics derived from the freedom associated with an enemy not confined to one tile.

Of course, it could also mean increase in complexity for no gain. I don't know how it would play out.

[Implojin]

For what it's worth, I halfheartedly took a look at this last year when I was working on Maneater Toads.

The tentacle code is a mess, and it probably wouldn't be any good to try to repurpose that for multi-tile monsters that are meant to remain confined within a 2x2 or 3x3. With some massaging you could probably make the existing tentacle code work with monsters that are more amorphous, though. There's also the pathing code to consider, which would presumably need refactoring to handle monsters that are too wide for 1-tile chokepoints.

A possible benefit here would be graphical tiles of varying sizes for 1-tile monsters, which already sort of exist as 2-tile panlords but aren't used much, and it would maybe be good to have that more readily available for things like that recent Ice Fiend tile that roctavian said was hard to fit wings into.

Multitile monsters have some interesting gameplay potential, but would likely be a lot of work to add to Crawl's codebase.

[advil]

I've thought about this a bit too but currently, the tentacle code is and has been a huge source of edge-case bugs, so it's not a good foundation to base anything on. The whole thing would need to be reengineered, I think.

Also, a large monster that couldn't enter 1-space corridors isn't necessarily a great idea gameplay-wise without something in levelgen being modified to account for luring issues, or something else in the monster's design (or in pathing) countering this. If I were implementing this I'd want start with something amorphous, e.g. a 2x2 thing that shifted to 4-tiles long in a narrow corridor.

[amaril]

all the monsters are one monster . sometimes space forms between the monster . sometimes the monster seems to go away entirely . but the monster is always there

[Shard1697]

A big monster that just crashes through and destroys walls would also sidestep the problem of it getting caught up on things.

[chequers]

2x2 boulder beetle when

[Shtopit]

A big monster that just crashes through and destroys walls would also sidestep the problem of it getting caught up on things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEYViV8p-Ow