March has been dedicated to showing off the progress we’ve managed to make in Metavoidal over last few months, either through direct comparison or (like in this case) a handy little breakdown of how we’ve gone about fixing issues. Thanks to all the playtesting you guys have done for us so far, we’re finally on the right track to the next big update!

First up is Megan, and her Guide to Abseiling! for spiders :P Here’s what she has to say!

Issue: How to get a spider enemy to properly rappel down from the ceiling!?

Solution: CODE REUSE!

Why reinvent the wheel? We already had code to move a platform (the raft at the end of a level) once the player stepped on it, from a starting to an end point. I also don’t need to move the actual spider enemy, just the sprite, from the start point to the end point and then spawn the spider. The spider can be hidden until that point and the shadow (indicating where the trigger is to start the spider moving) will be shown.

I took some of the platform code and reworked it for this. I needed to adjust it to work for this new object, be timed correctly and just positioned right that the spider will never randomly “pop in” from the player perspective. We also had very good sprites done by our artists that deceptively make it seem as if the spider web was always there when in reality it moves with the spider.

So I created a “prefab” (a type of component in Unity) that:

1. When the player steps into the shadow below it shows the spider, and starts the animation of it climbing down.
2. When it reaches the bottom, it spawns the spider enemy “prefab” and destroys the original abseiling “prefab” since it’s no longer needed.

That’s it!

Right Click & Open on a New Tab to take a closer look!

We hope that’s at least helpful to any budding/fellow game devs who stumble upon this devlog! We’ll be doing one of these every Friday this month, so check in next week for another update! :D

As always, if you want to chat and get to know us & our game, feel free to follow our progress online :3 https://msha.ke/yellowlabgames

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK <3