Spiderfriend

Independent Project

Giant spiders get a bad rep, so it's up to you to earn the trust of mankind. You play as the misunderstood hero, taking risks in dangerous environments to rescue stranded humans and shepherd them to safety in this 3D strategy/puzzle game.

Individual Contribution

Independent project created in Unity 3D. Spider and Human characters assets are from the Unity Store, and some of the code is integrated from online libraries. Everything else is by me.

Features

This project was conceptualised while studying my Games Design BA from designing the 3Cs for a giant spider player character. My initial design was a first-person puzzle game focused on traversal on walls and ceilings as well as building climbable web surfaces, with a focus on locomotion in a 3D environment from the POV of a spider. I'm interested by spiders as playable characters because they have sticky feet, wide field of vision and the ability to build traversable structures.

First-Person Spider Prototype

I created this prototype in Unity C# using raycasts and quaternion rotation to detect and align the character/camera to new surface normals, as well as for instantiating web strands along a line from the character to the target point.

Basic 3D Modelling and IK Rigging

The project changed direction when I took inspiration from Lemmings (1991), Sheep (2000) and Pikmin (2001) to design a strategy puzzle game based on the same giant spider character but with the objective of herding sheep-like flocks of humans to safety. I created design documentation to focus my vision of the game and designed the first 10 levels on paper.

Game design document

Level designs

To create the new prototype, I learned how to integrate an existing library of AI steering behaviours into the game architecture which required writing custom code in Unity C#, then created a blockout of level 1 to balance metrics including the size, movement and rotation speed of all characters as well as steering behaviours of AI agents such as distance and angles for separation, alignment, cohesion, fleeing and obstacle avoidance.

I also created a mechanics gym with a variety of interactable objects and environments to test the game feel and "prove the fun" of the gameplay:

• Doors that are opened by the player using a crosshair to point and click on a switch

• Doors that are opened by the player herding X number of NPCs onto a pressure switch

• Ladders that are climbable only by NPCs when herded towards them

• Walls that are climbable only by the player by walking up them

• Tunnels that are traversible only by NPCs when herded into them

• Collectibles that are only picked up by the player

• Collectibles that are only picked up by NPCs

  
  

In the latest iteration of the project, I recreated the player character and AI agents in Unreal Engine 5 in order to practise UE-specific implementation of AI systems. I integrated blueprints for simulating flocking behaviours using the BOID model into an AIController class that uses a blackboard, behavior tree and services for additional steering behaviours such as fleeing from the player character and pacing while idle.

Spiderfriend Prototype in UE5

The player character is created using UE's ThirdPersonCharacter blueprint and assets from the UE store.