Project: Spyder

Description

Project: Spyder is a stealth game where you assemble and control a high-tech hexa/octapod to infiltrate megacorporations and steal classified information.

This is a passion project of mine. Over the years I've revisited this idea about 6 times, each time with a different concept/genre in mind. I've finally landed on turning this into a stealth game where you play as a 'Spyder Operator', creating your own drone that can climb most surfaces and using it to infiltrate corporate facilities to find and steal top secret intel.

Below I talk about some of the mechanics I envision for this project, as well as the process I've used so far.

Current state: Prototype (Teaser)

Engine: Unity

Mechanics

• Assemble your drones: Buy new frames and equip them with powerful modules to add new capabilities to your Spyders.
  • Customize your approach: Different frames will have different specialties; some are small and nimble, while others are larger and can fit more modules to expand your options in the field. Some will even have unique abilities, like the 'WHL-400' that can contract into a ball to escape at high speeds, or the 'HTR-100' that can go invisible for a short amount of time.
• Climb Everything, Small but Hidden: In true spider style, you'll be able to climb (almost) every surface. You'll also be much smaller than your typical stealth game protagonist. This adds two new dimensions that separate the project from other games in the genre.
• Procedural Stealth: Each level will be unique; the name of the game is 'adapt and survive', not 'memorize and quickload'.

Process

This project is currently on hold. However, I'd still like to take the time to talk about what I've done so far.

With every project I work on, I first try to identify the things that I'm most uncertain about. These usually end up proving to be the largest threats to the project, so I try to tackle them first to minimze potential time wasted, and to increase my rate of iteration. In this case, I identified the 'procedural stealth' and the 'first-person-climb-everything' ideas as being the most risky.

1. Climb Everything: The ability to walk on everything in first person also means that players could very easily lose their bearings. To test this assumption and to find possible remedies, I created the test level you can download on this page. The following tricks are the results of my experiments so far:
   1. Color the floor and ceilings differently. This makes it easy to always know which way's up and which one's down.
   2. Have clean graphics. More detail means more noise, and more noise means not being able to make snap decisions as easily when they matter the most.
   3. Use landmarks. Easily recognizable objects (like the colored pads in the second room of this demo) make it so you can visualize a plan and stick to it while executing.
   4. Auto-balance the camera. The camera system tries it best to maintain what it was looking at. In early attempts, the camera was just attached to the spider. But as the spider rotated (pitch axis), the camera moved as well, without the player's input. Now, the camera tries as much as possible (without taking control away from the player) to keep itself steady.
   5. Add bevels to everything: A small addition, but an important one. Objects/walls should almost always have beveled corners. This makes it more natural for players to figure out which routes they can take ("you can climb on walls! don't use just the floor!"), and also makes it much smoother to move around objects in first-person. This, in combination with the auto-balancing of the camera, makes for very smooth first-person spiderlike movement on walls.
2. Procedural Stealth: This one's obvious; stealth games often contain carefully crafted level designs and enemy placement to have perfect control of the pacing of the experience; placing just enough obstacles so that players can't just waltz through your levels, while providing readable windows of opportunity to attack their objectives. Removing this control (by using procedural generation) means understanding what makes a stealth game engaging and finding tricks to simulate those feelings when you don't have perfect control over the levels. 
   1. NOTE: I was in the middle of creating the level generator when this project was put on hold. My findings so far have been limited as I wasn't able to test my assumptions.
   2. One big inspiration for more solid level generation comes from Unexplored; its 'cyclic' level generation means being able to reliably create 'key and door' obstacles that will natural to play.
   3. VENTS. A stealth movie trope; have vents leading from room to room, to increase movement options and allow players to approach challenges from different angles. Because of our spiderlike character, we can have alternative styles of gameplay inside of these vents as well (e.g. robots that patrol the vents).
   4. WIP

Controls

Movement: WASD
Look: Mouse
Sprint [unlockable]: Left Shift
Jump [unlockable]: Space
Quit: Escape