Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon is a new game out now for iOS and Steam that's a follow-up to the classic 2009 hit Spider, The Secret of Bryce Manor, and like that game, puts the player in the perspective of a spider, weaving webs with an agile flick of the screen, while also uncovering the mysteries of the human world the spider inhabits. Along with other features, the new game comes with a seriously cool effect: The game changes based on your real world weather. (More on that below.)
The Spider games are lead designed by Randy Smith, who was also lead designer on the classic, beloved Thief PC/console games, which remain incredibly influential on current games like Dishonored and the BioShock franchise. Thief was great in large part because of its immersiveness, and Randy believes the real world weather feature will make this new Spider game immersive in a way that's unique to the mobile era:
"Spider, with your permission, learns where you are in the real world and mirrors the time and weather you see outside your window in the game," Randy tells me. "So after the sun sets, it becomes night at Blackbird Estate. When rain falls in real life, it also falls in the game. This impacts which insect emerge, making all 30 levels highly re-playable during different conditions, and it even impacts the story and puzzles. Unless it is raining, for example, the windmill doesn't spin all the way around, but of course you can't go up the water spout during a rain storm. The moon phase in the game is even a reflection of the real life one, and you'll need to observe it to solve the deepest puzzles and capture the trickiest rare moths."
After the break, more from Randy on Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon's new features, gameplay immersion -- and the creativity the game's players are bringing to the game in ways even he and his team didn't predict:
What are the biggest changes to Spider 2 from the first game?
"As much as we loved the first Spider game, Rite of the Shrouded Moon is so much bigger, richer, and more immersive that it will make the first one feel like a prototype. The first game is elegant, spare, and simple, and it left us with lots of axes to improve and expand upon. We made Spider into the fully-fledged game it deserved to be. The production quality is very high with beautifully fleshed out environments that feature lots of animation and dynamics.
"The scope is much greater with 30 levels, multiple locations per level, dozens of new insects, new game modes, achievements, you name it. This has led, among other things, to deeper core gameplay where topping the leaderboards requires forming and executing your own plans with the agility and cunning of a real spider, with legitimate competitive play and many solutions possible. There's once again a story told primarily through the environment, and this is a larger, more complex tale that involves a secret society who built a mysterious estate and the fate of the family who was living there. Instead of one hidden puzzle, this Spider features one puzzle per location that you can explore on the estate map, but all of those puzzles add up to... ... well, we'll leave that for you to figure out."
How have you increased immersiveness in this sequel beyond the real world weather feature?
"In general, we worked hard to blur the lines between game and reality in new and interesting ways. I don't know if any games have taken the real time and weather ideas further than we have. We wanted this to feel exciting, even a little creepy, when you see moths circling around lights and you realize it's become night outside your window. We want you to think "Hey, it started raining!" and reach for Spider because you have a specific clue you wanted to investigate in the rain.
"Spider has always addressed that boundary between game and player, most notably in that you play a character who cares nothing for the human drama it explores its way through, even though you the human player watching over the spider's shoulder may find yourself drawn into the story. We took this even further with the secret society depicted in Spider. They are an actual historical one, and to learn the deepest secrets you'll need to do research in real life to learn about them, then apply that back to the game. We've been quiet about this so far, but once people have had Spider for a little while, I want to get noisy about it, since it's a very interesting and deep aspect of the game, if you're the kind of player who is into immersion."
What are some of the most interesting emergent gameplay you're seeing among beta testers?
"Spider's core gameplay is about drawing webs in environments and getting insects to fly into them.
Between the web-drawing tools, which are highly flexible, the environmental shapes and dynamics, and the large variety of insect behaviors and vulnerabilities, it rapidly becomes the case that all sorts of strategies are possible. Not just for cleaning the entire level, but rather where the most "spider-like" gameplay happens: when you're competing for high scores.
"We've seen advanced players build webs where we thought none were possible, by cleverly manipulating the environment. We've seen players rack up combos and leverage multipliers in obscure ways that I never would have thought to try, but make perfect sense when you think about it. It's always a badge of honor as a game designer when you realize you've made a game system deep enough for your players to take over and master more than you have. It's like they're saying 'Thanks, we'll take it from here,' and then showing us how it's meant to be done."
Screenshots courtesy Tiger Style.
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