Been a few days since an update. Generally I don't like posting things unless I am happy with the progress/output but realise this leads to long gaps between updates so need to stop it.

As such, this is a far from perfect example of how I am imagining the main enemy will look:

The idea being at times there will be set piece animations like the one above where it may not interact with the player at all, or once spawned will actively pursue the player. In the above I was toying with distance based alpha to give a kinda phasing-in look which I think works for a non-intractable set piece. Also this is not volumetric fog, rather cheap particle fog which causes some visual glitches but Godot's 3D out of the box is not efficient.

I have been working on the AI for this mechanic using https://github.com/chrisphyffer/godot-kinematic-ai-mechanics as a basis, but there's a fair amount of additional customization to put in before I'll be happy with it:

One of the interesting things with this was getting the death animation to work. Basically i used a fixed position node attached to the enemy to define where the camera will interpolate to once the enemy attacks. This will mean if the enemy attacks from behind you the camera will spin around to face it. Add to that some basic full screen shader textures with alpha keyframed to an animation and it doesn't look entirely terrible.

Currently this is using an unmodified mixamo attack animation which I will change considering the enemy has no mouth, plus I want the waypoint movement to be much slower/lumbering, then react to seeing the player, THEN change to fast crawling.

I also intend to add a down raycast to detect the floor and will define the floor surface to tie in a footstep sound function to the root motion animation. This should mean as the enemy runs over a given surface, the footsteps will match the feet hitting the ground AND the surface it's running on.

I have a second set of enemies in mind that are kinda crawling eyeballs, but I need to animate these. Also these will have some funk as I want them to be able to climb walls/ceiling and chase the player while avoiding each other (boids like). A lot to do! but also a lot done considering it's only the end of week 2.