SpiderMum

About

Enjoying the results and feeling of completing a game in the GMTK Game Jam 2019 I entered the following year which had the theme of “Out of Control”, I’d also set myself the target of only using assets entirely created by myself in the 48 hours.

Process

My take on ‘Out of Control’ was the idea on exponential actions, originally thinking along the lines of zombies and survivors where the more you loose the bigger the threat becomes as people turn. I began prototyping the concept with simple coloured circles to show the different unit types spawning more and more that tracked the player. The concept was fairly basic but the controls were fun and the oppressiveness of the horde chasing up adding a good feeling of pressure, it needed something more though.

This is when I came up with the concept for the ‘Spidermum’ laying eggs as it moved about the level that would hatch a baby spider, which themselves could lay eggs. So the game became about resources as the baby spiders seek food to survive but when none is in range/available they will turn on the mother and eat her instead.

After that I needed to add some ‘prey’ creatures to diversify the range of AI interactions which also lead to the idea of the baby spiders being an army the mother spider uses to create new food sources by hunting down other insects.

Finally I set about creating all the art and sounds to add finish to the game even making an approximating a version of ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ in BoscaCeoil.

Post Mortem

Having looked into and gotten better with using programming design methods I focused a lot on the ‘Observer’ method using events to trigger eggs hatching, enemy spawns, checks for nearby food and so on. The problem with this is I’d also wanted an element of rhythm to the game so these events were triggered from a ‘metronome’ class meaning on some beats 100’s of event calls could be called at the same time when the spider horde got big enough, giving me another valuable lesson ‘don’t over use design methods’.

The fact I completed this game in the given time even with doing my own artwork, animations and sound was another great confidence boost for me and spurred me on to starting work on ‘Athrust‘.