5SD064 – Game Design Blog 08/02
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Spider behavior and mechanics This week I redesigned and specified the behavior and mechanics of the spider, one of the enemies in our game ”Beelonging”. The reason for this is that I, as the designer of the team, wanted to communicate my vision better to the the rest of the team, specifically the artists and programmers, as well as balance this enemy that I felt was a bit too inbalanced. The spider is supposed to climb up and down a string of web, stay on each end of the string for a set amount of time, then throw a ball of web aimed at the player and go to the other end and repeat this process until the screen scrolls by or it is killed. Originally, the set amount of time the spider stayed on each end of its string before shooting its projectile was set to one second. I felt that this went by too fast as the screen scrolled automatically at a set speed. So I decided to change it to two seconds, which gives time for the spider to clearly aim, for the shooting animation to take place and for the Player to react accordingly. As for the aiming I wanted to show that compared to every other enemy, the spider is aiming its projectiles directly at you when the Player enters the part where the spiders spawn and does this for the rest of the screen. To clarify this clearly to the Player I decided that the entire spider will follow the Players movements by turning its body based on where the Player moves horizontally. This gives a clear difference to other enemies and makes it obvious that the Spider is watching you. To further clarify that this spider might shoot at you, its projectile, made up of a ball of web, is already being made in its hands as its aiming for the Player. This was all design decisions I felt helped the artists and programmers with their specific tasks. To further help the artists in the character design of the spider I showed them pictures of certain spiders that looked unique and discussed with them what to use as inspiration. //Karl Lindkvist  |