3/28/2023 0 Comments Arachnophilia eating a bat![]() ![]() ![]() They start simple, with flies, but you’ll soon encounter bees (which do more damage to your web and hurt you when you eat them), fireflies (which attract a barrage of moths to your web when they get stuck), and dragonflies (which supercharge your spider when you eat them). (I always loved that little morbid feature of the game.)Īs the game progresses, you’ll encounter new insects. You’ll have to slowly wait as your spider starves to death. If your web breaks too much, you won’t be able to catch food, so you won’t be able to eat. You lose if your health goes down to zero. But if you click on a bug you caught, your spider will run over to it and eat it, recharging webbing and health. If enough weaken your web, it will break and all the contained insects will fly free.īuilding your web takes webbing, and your spider’s health meter is always going down. If one hits your web, it will get stuck, but it will also weaken that part of the web. If you drag your mouse, you’ll run to the first point you clicked, then hop to the second, adding another strand to your web as you go. If you click on the web or a nearby branch, you’ll run there. So how do you even play the game? Arachnopilia is a spider web simulator. Given that the game is unlike any other, I’m not sure how easily any framework would have fit it anyway. It was probably a lot more work than using an existing framework, but it meant I knew the code inside and out. I started with points, defined lines, circles, etc. It’s something few would do, but it seemed like the natural thing to do. I built Arachnophilia from the geometry up. I just plowed forward without worrying about it and somehow every major obstacle was overcome. I’d made some small games before, especially on my calculator in high school, but I’d never released a game and was tackling a lot of challenges for the first time. When I started building Arachnophilia, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I can barely even recognize the person who did all that now. During development I also took my first solo backpacking trip (which was a colossal failure) and had to rush the game out before a couple of friends and I took off for a road trip to Alaska. In addition to working a part time job and doing research in a lab at Berkeley, I spent all my free time working on this game. Looking back, I have no idea how I did it. I built Arachnophilia in an amazingly fast six months. I’ve always been inspired by themes from nature, and this fit that pattern perfectly.Īdditionally, fresh out of undergrad and getting ready for grad school, I was excited to build a game around the graph data structure, still one of my favorites. It seemed like a theme that hadn’t been explored before but that most people would be able to intuitively grasp and enjoy. The inspiration for the game came from the idea that it would be fun to create a web structure using simple physics. The trick worked! I was motivated to get my applications in, then immediately started working on the game. I took some notes, started getting excited, then put it aside, promising myself I wouldn’t actually develop the game until I got my applications in. ![]() I came up with the idea one night when I was putting off applying for grad school. The first game I released was Arachnophilia, a spider web simulation game. Play Arachnophilia (mouse or touch screen strongly recommended). I hope some of you will play or replay those games one more time before they’re lost from this world, likely forever. With Adobe ending support of Flash at the end of this year, I decided it was time to take a moment to look back on this stage of my life and the games I created during it. Back then I basically did it all: design, programming, and even art, for better or worse. But I actually got my start making small Flash games. Most of you probably know me as a board game designer. ![]()
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