[SUBMISSION] Pestilence

Information:
Name: Pestilence
Difficulty: Medium - Hard
Connection: Mancubus
Summon: Pestilence
Melee: No
Distance: Projectile, Poison Cloud, Summon attack
Type: Poisonous Demon
Brightmaps: Yes
ACS: No
Actor modification: No

Credits:
Code: Kan3
GLDefs: Kan3
Sounds: Kan3, The Skulltag Team
Sprites: Id Software
Sprite Edit: Kan3


Description:
It lives in the rottenness and decay and it will poison any living being that it smells out.
If it detects its victim, it shoots bursts of explosive toxic fireballs, if not,
it will scatter spherical poisonous mines on the ground, but probably the most dangerous thing to do
is dealing with its tentacles: they can travel underground and grab their targets from below,
poisoning them to death.
It has a great mouth in its abdomen and it's better not to know what would happen if someone got too close... 
It really has a lot of health, but it's slow, a good strategy would possibly be to burn it down with fire...

Sprite:


Download link:
 

I really like this monster, but rather than a boss, I think it would work better as a mid-hard tier enemy, like the Hectebus or the Bruiser Demon.
I also think the monster sounds should have their volume reduced a bit, but that may be just me.

Thank you!
I imagined it as a boss monster because I made it with in mind the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse theme and so, a sort of unique enemy, but I don't think it's an issue to make him "weaker".

Though, what do you think I should do with his attack that triggers only when the monster is below a certain amount of hp? Because drastically reducing the hp makes this check pretty pointless. Should I transform it in a common attack with no checks?

Yeah, I think making it a regular attack is fine.

Updated:

• No more BOSS flag
• Hp reduced to 1100
• No more "Hp Check" for "Tentacles" attack
• Slightly reduced attacks damage
• Reduced size and hitbox of both creature and projectiles
• Slightly reduced sounds volume

For categorizing it's tentacle attack, you could call it a summon attack instead, since it spawns tentacles at the targets' location.

My only main issues with it, is that sometimes it seems to fire its' first shots away from the player at whatever direction it was going before attacking, and that said shots seem to sometimes move certain cars  from the Voxel Vehicles Pack  45 degrees of pitch for a single frame, I have no idea why that happens though, since none of the code mentions changing the pitch and/or roll of anything.

Also, the way the wander state works is kind of strange, it basically makes the monster immediately forget its' target once it's out of sight, and start wandering aimlessly. Meaning that you can avoid encounters with it by basically just leaving. It would probably be better to rename the Wander state to Idle, so that it goes there when the monster no longer has a target because it was killed or removed.
If you want it to eventually give up on enemies though, you could give it a timer that resets every time the target is visible again, and if it reaches zero or above a certain threshold, makes the monster forget the target and go back to wandering.

Might also want to give it an editor number to make it more easily accessible for newbies, but that's not necessary if you don't want to.

Thanks for suggestion!

If for "first attack" you mean the bouncing grenades, they are (were) meant to be shot in the direction the monster was looking, if you referred to the fatshot-like attack, then I have no clue, cause I never encountered this issue Same goes for voxel vehicles.

The reason behind the switching state is the target is out of sight, was an attempt to give the monster a sort of partial blindness, but I think you're right, so I already updated the download link
I added a small counter, so that the monster will play its "chase state" at least 4 times before entering the Idle state.
I also changed the bouncing grenade attack check, so that he will shoot grenades to the target when he's not in sight during the chase state, so that the monster tries to drive out the target from its hiding place.
Couple of changes to the mines and grenade actors to be more consistent.

I think it was the FatShot attack that did this, since I recall the projectiles flying normally, and looking at the code again it seems like the mine attack is only called when the monster is hurt or wandering, while I noticed the bug while it was actively chasing and seeing me, unless you changed when it throws the mines too, like you changed it to face it's target when firing them.

As for the voxel vehicles, yeah I have no idea either. But it still seems to occur, and seems to be exclusive to the voxel vehicles, it doesn't affect any models such as the street lights in the video below:

https://streamable.com/4p3x81

It also seems to affect voxels caught in the blast radius of the fat shot attack in general, instead of only happening from direct hits like shown in the video.

Okay update on that bug where the voxels changed pitch when hit by the projectiles. It doesn't seem to be exclusive to your submission, it's also happening with my own mod too, which I found out after gibbing my Army Car NPC.




It happens with all radius damage and thrusting it seems, and also doesn't happen in GZDoom 4.8.2, so it seems to be exclusive to dev builds like the one I use. I'm not sure why it happens, but it must be some kind of bizarre bug, it even causes the pitch of the car actors to change appropriately, as they slow down in mid air and begin to fall down again.

https://streamable.com/fzp07r

I see, weird. Have you seen this behaviour (of shooting the fatshot in the the wrong direction) even with the changes I made?
There was a low probability of mines shooting before, even while chasing, now much higher probability while chasing, but only if his target is hidden.

It doesn't seem to be exclusive to your submission

Ok, that’s a relief, for me at least, maybe not much for you though x)