Hi,

I am studying the trajectories of enemies in the arcade game Defender.

The enemies are:

-lander

-mutant

-baiter

-bomber

-pod

-swarmer

I can't find any tutorial on the internet explaining how to program the trajectory of each of these enemies.

Do you have any idea on this?

thanks

What I know, which is more offtopic, is that in the early years of video games, there were more than often some games which had ‘their own life’. This was caused from some hardware weirdness, memory swaps or whatever random side effects. A famous example is Nintendo's Super Mario, especially Lakitu or it's movement pattern to be precise. I don't know if they finally detected why it was moving this way but it wasn't intended.

Another of those weirdnesses is for example The Elder Scrolls Skyrim and the treasure fox behavior, which leads to foxes in the wild guide players to treasure hideouts

You clearly require a close inspection of the original, which implies typical reverse engineering techniques: disassembling the readily available ROM dumps and running some emulator frame by frame and through breakpoints to understand and measure minute details of object movement.

It looks like a lot of effort, and it is. Maybe you can limit yourself to guessing plausible simple algorithms and quantitative parameters, to approximate Defender behaviours in your game.