Heya! Time for a non-regularly scheduled devlog.
It's been a couple of months since I released the
SpiderHeck demo on Steam and
BY THE WAY, thank you all for playing it, we have been consistently hovering on 1st and 2nd page of most popular demos, and that to me is kind of mindblowing!
Based on your feedback, I am happy with how the game plays and looks, so I have been mostly focusing on polishing and adding more content. Today I’d like to show you something new.
If you don’t want to read through this post, feel free to check out the video version of the devlog.
Watch the New Devlog
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Please note: this is still work in progress and not all of these enemies might end up being in the final version of the game.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
If you have played the demo, you are already familiar with the two existing enemies. These current enemies either try to stab you with their stingers or roll you over with their… rollers?
So with the new enemies, I wanted to change up the gameplay a little bit and the obvious way to do that when all your enemies are melee is by adding some ranged enemies! I know. Genius.
Introducing new enemies
First new enemy I worked on was this bug thing I am calling Khepri. For some reason my brain didn’t let me just make a wasp with a gun (even though it does sound kind of cool when I write this) because I needed to do something “interesting”, so I ended up with this beetle thing… that shoots energy spheres at you.
There are a couple of cool things about it. Initially, the projectiles it shoots were meant to be fast and very bouncy, kind of like the ones you may remember from the Half Life 2. But, I quickly realized that giving something like that to the enemies was going to get very frustrating for players. All the bounciness is going to lead to a lot of random deaths… which let’s be honest… the game already has plenty of.
So instead I slowed the projectiles down quite a bit, and to still keep them a threat, made the spheres bigger while also having them follow players.
That might sound a bit scary, but there are a bunch of ways to counter them! The obvious one – just move. But besides that, you can also shoot or deflect these with your particle blade.
To make it even more interesting in terms of deflection, once you hit these spheres with a particle blade they will actually stop following you and start homing in on the enemies, giving you this little new ally.
My intention with this enemy was to make it more like a pest that isn’t quite dangerous up front BUT needs to be dealt with fast, otherwise it's going to spawn too many of these energy spheres until you get overwhelmed.
And just to prevent you from simply shooting it down, the only way to destroy it is by hitting the glowing part on it’s back. You will need to hit its head first to make it spin around, so it can get a little tricky. Or just use explosives. They work fine here.
Second enemy I have made is a bit more straightforward. I am currently calling it a Whisp but it might need to be renamed as I don’t think the name is a perfect match with what this turned out to be.
The goal with this enemy was to make something that is opposite of Khepri as in – something that is fast and hard to hit.
The way it behaves is – it zips around in an unpredictable way until it decides to focus on you and blast you with its weapon. From tests so far, it can get pretty stressful when you are facing other enemies, and all of a sudden you see a Whisp start charging its cannon aimed at you. It is also surrounded by spinning blades, so you probably shouldn’t touch it!
As for counterplay – the basic version of it is very fragile, requiring you to only hit it once to destroy it. You can deflect its shots with the particle blade. You may even want to completely avoid destroying it since dodging the projectiles can make it kill other enemies for you. Handy!
An explosive roller! This is just that.
Originally it was intended as a joke, but then I took myself seriously and actually made it. This is dedicated to anyone who played the demo and spawn killed the enemies by putting their blade into a spawn zone.
It resembles the existing roller enemy but this one has a mine inside it. I know, amazing design. This enemy will troll the spawn killers and will also make you move around even more since, you know, avoiding explosions is generally a good idea.
And while it can be extremely deadly to you, it is also deadly to other enemies if you time it right.
And that should do it for today’s devlog! There are certainly more enemies coming to
SpiderHeck in the future, these are just the ones I am ready to talk about. Let me know what you think of these and don’t forget to wishlist the game!
Thank you,
Neverjam
