Ettin Royal Guard

Information:

Name: Ettin Royal Guard
Difficulty: Easy/Medium
Connections: Ettin
Summon: EttinRoyal
Melee: Yes
Distance: No
Type: Demon/Magical
Brightmaps: Yes
Actor modification: No
ACS: No

Credits:

Code: Rifleman
Sounds: Hexen/Ettin
Sprites: Hexen/Ettin
Sprite Edit: Rifleman
Idea Base: Wanted to make Ettins less useless, so I created a support actor for them.

Description:Only the strongest and most loyal amongst the Ettin get to become a Royal Guard.These hulking brutes inspire nearby Ettin to endure pain and chase enemies with more vigor,but can also slip through ranks to the front where the fighting's thickest. They will try to take you with them from behind the grave.

Sprite:

Download: Attached

I love the concept! Really great job!

One thing that I would change is maybe the alpha of the flat blue ring, just because it looks slightly too invasive in my opinion

I have to agree sadly. Though it's a cool effect, just doesn't seem to suit the atmosphere. Maybe a different sprite or effect? Like the bruiser demon?

It's a very interesting idea. A leader type enemy that can empower its allies.

I wonder if it would be possible to explore this concept further for other enemies in the future. Enemies could rally and form up into units or blobs around a leader enemy like this - sort of like the officer characters in the Dynasty Warriors games. Maybe using thing hate/goal/follow (I forget the exact name).

The recolour is a little rough but it looks alright. Regarding the circle effect - perhaps it could be wider to represent the true diameter of the effect, and also make it animate slower and more translucent. I think that would make it easier on the eyes. it's also not flat in software mode but I don't think there's anything to be done about that.

Overall an interesting idea, I like it.

Thanks guys! I'll rework that circle and reupload

The problem with flat sprites is that they render on top of other sprites even if they are below/behind, the larger the sprite the more noticable it is. You can even see it in the gif animation, the circle renders on top of the Ettin's legs.
It would probably look better if you used several small floorhugger sprites that circle around the Ettin via a_warp, or spawn particles around him that refresh every tic.
I had the same problem with some aura powerups I'm currently working on. One powerup spawned a flame ring around the player, but it just looked bad when monsters walked inside the ring so I scrapped the flat sprites entirely and worked with textured particles instead.

The idea itself is great though, nice work.

Made a new version, with particles effect instead of the sprite. I kinda suck at working with particle functions, but I think it looks decent. Attached to the original post.

Yeah that particle effect looks much better than the blue circle imo.

The only thing that's bothering me a bit is how the melee attack sound is cut off when he starts whacking at you repeatedly. One way to solve this is to remove the AttackSound line from the default block and add TNT1 A 0 A_Startsound("EttinAttack",0); to the beginning of the melee state.

btw I noticed a few redundant lines in the code. Actor mo is declared twice but both times is never used at all, also your A_SpawnParticleEx function has several lines where the value is 0. Those can safely be removed, unless you left them in there to tweak these settings later ofc.
And since you are using SPF_ROLL, it might look cool to have the particle sprite roll around a bit for variety, for example startroll: random(1,360).

OK while typing this reply I got an idea, how about adding that particle effect to the affected Ettin as well? Kinda like this I tried this and it looks pretty cool. That way the affected Ettin has only one particle per tic spawning around him but it still does a good job at letting the player know they are under the influence of the big guy.

Thanks for the suggestions, I used them all. I actually wanted to have the effect on other Ettin back when I had the blue circle, but the decided not to for reasons.

Well, now I think it's ready for prime time.

Added