Question Anyone got any good places to find inspiration from?

All of the enemies (besides bosses) in my game are combat drones like these

I'm having a very hard time trying to find inspiration for new enemies. I keep accidently creating an enemy I already have or an enemy that's too bulky or one that looks too menacing over and over. I tried searching on google images and even using multiple AI image generators but I just can't find any ones that are in the style that I'm going for.

Any one got any suggestions?

 

Why are you creating enemies? Like, each new enemy. What purpose does it serve?


edit: just in case you don't know what I'm getting at... what is the story of this world? does each new enemy need to serve some specific game design role? Idea is that form can derive from function. So if we know more about the world, the game design, the specific gameplay roles of an enemy, that is all the necessary prerequisite data needed to then figure out what sort of references would fit for inspiration.

 

It's a wave based game so really the enemies are only there to harm the player in some way. I'm not looking for inspiration about the ways the enemies work, just about the designs of the enemies; what they look like.

 

It's not about "how they work" but about world building. Backstory is a source of inspiration for designs. Are they mining bots searching for rocks, metals, energy, water? Are they minions of a mage looking for anything that smells like magic? Are they guardians protecting a prize from invaders like you? Are they soldiers from afar out to conquer your prize? Do they need to travel far, do they need to avoid certain terrains, do they seek certain parts of the map or certain types of objects? Do they repel each other, or work in teams? A little backstory will dig into those seemingly tangential questions, and then feed into your more practical design questions: do they need wheels? do they need thrusters? do they have laser pointy bits or sharp metal pointy bits? do they have cameras or do they have pilots within them?

Without some kind of backstory, you're limited to just squishing some geometrical primitives together and deciding if it looks cool or not. That's fine, but eventually your inspiration will falter, and here we are.

 

Uh yeah, that's exactly what I've been doing this whole time. Have you been spying on me?

Anyways I do have some backstory for most robots. The main idea of the game is that robots were basically being used for everything but they went rogue and now you have military robots, police robots, and things like assassin robots running wild and the player is the one sent to exterminate them.

Oh and I searched "combat drone" on sketchfab and there's some great sources there, I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier.

 

I was trying to say, explain to us how the enemies work, and then we can show you ideas for what they might look like.

So you might have a checklist like:

1. Military robots
1a. small
- light machine gun
- fast strafing movement
- dies from three hits with small weapon, or 1 hit from big weapon
- usually come in swarms of 3-5, sometimes accompany a Squad leader military robot
- the enemy you kill the most
- drops ammo when destroyed


So from that, it is not hard to start imagining how the thing might look, because we know what it's function is. Without a checklist like that, what can we say? Go watch some sci-fi movies, or look at the clouds?

edit: everything the post above said is good questions too

 

@jlorenzi
Check out the enemies from jrpg's, or from games like Metroid Prime 1, and Phantasy Star Online on the dreamcast and gamecube. Those games have lots of unique enemies.

Like enemy chickens in PSO.

And sand beetles, sandworms and phantom sentry drones in Metroid Prime.