GENRE
Narrative Horror
CONTRIBUTION
All except for art assets
TIME
5 Weeks
(2022)
TEAM SIZE
1
ENGINE
Unity
my friend the spider
First Person
PC
Single Player
10 - 15 minutes
My Friend The Spider is a small “horror” game about isolation and depression.
Currently the game sits at 18.300 downloads and 47.500 views on itch.io as well as having a Very Positive rating on Steam.
concept
A couple of months after starting my education at Future Games in late 2022, I embarked on a solo project based on a narrative idea I had to expand my knowledge in C# programming and become more comfortable with Unity and FMOD.
The game at its core is a walking simulator where the player finds themselves voluntarily locked in a room to escape and isolate due to their current emotional state and befriending a spider that grows in size with the story's progression.
game loop
progress
in the story
spectate
the development of
the main character
interact
with the environment
release
I released the game on itch.io and a few days later I was surprised at the amount of attention it was receiving.
Popular YouTubers across the globe were playing the game and thousands of people were commenting and giving positive feedback on the game's narrative and sound design.
Currently the game sits at 18.300 downloads and 47.500 views on itch.io as well as having a Very Positive rating on Steam.
“An impressive feat”
“It’s good!”
design process
not a doctor
Before I even created a Unity Project, I had a clear idea of how the game would take place - by having events separated by days/scenes. I had some scenes in mind but I wasn’t sure in which order would I set them since I wasn’t sure of pacing at that moment.
Some ideas were scrapped - in one scene the player finds themselves in a bigger version of the room, having to walk a lot to find the door (which subsequently closes on them). I had a similar idea but instead of having a bigger room, I would just shrink the player - making them feel small and insignificant (which plays a part in the themes of the game)
I discarded the last idea since I felt was reusing the previous one and didn’t want to repeat things and bore the player.
retrospective
In retrospect, I feel the resolution could’ve been handled better. The moment the spider leaves the main character and the character decides to resume his contact with his friend is not clear, and one or two scenes going deep into his decision to improve could’ve benefitted the overall game.
programming
coroutines
Since the game thrives in its narrative and a lot of the events had to be timed, I researched an optimal way to achieve this and soon found out that Coroutines were going to be my friend (pun unintended) throughout the project.
Certain actions or narrative moments needed time to breathe between each other and so using Coroutines became second nature to me (even the subtitle system uses them).
Nevertheless, I discovered towards the end of the project that using coroutines all over can be potentially dangerous and so will look into better alternatives.
unity events
I created a script that used Unity Events in order to handle how each interaction would work. This made it easy and fast to trigger functions from other scripts (e.g. change Levels, and trigger FMOD emitters) since I needed to add one to every interactable object in every scene.
This, in conjunction with the coroutines, made it an optimal way to handle how the pacing of the game would flow.
3C - camera, character, control
The player controller was something that went through some changes throughout the project. Using an FPS Controller from the Unity Asset store, I modified it in order to satisfy the needs of the game.
At first, the player was able to jump in order to get on top of the couch or bed, which I liked because then the player would be able to look from different angles outside of the window (and support the feeling of isolation and being trapped). This is also what I wanted to emphasise by giving the player the impression that a big city was behind the window.
Nevertheless, I realized that while the main character is suffering from depression, having him be able to jump didn’t support this decision.
I also added the possibility to zoom in with the right click, so the player could focus on certain details of the room.
In a particular scene, the main character gets drunk by drinking wine. To support this, I had the controller become wobbly and difficult to manoeuvre.
This needed some tweaking as playtester friends told me they could feel a bit dizzy while playing, but in the end, loved the result and its connection to the narrative design
sound design
Since the game is bottled inside a single room with minor events happening here and there, more focus was put on the ambiance of specific moments (the sound of the city through the window, the eerieness of a scary moment, the apparent silence of the night).
Nevertheless, I still wanted to keep things detailed and real, so I created an FMOD event with a labelled parameter that changes the footsteps of the player depending if they’re walking on the wooden floor or the carpet.
sync
An important thing for me was the synchronization of the audio and the visual, which plays an important part in the brief moments the door opens and closes. I’m really happy with the feeling of the door since it’s a very impactful moment in terms of the narrative and the player’s interaction with it.
voice over
I also had the luck to have the help of my wife when it came to Voice Over work. At first, I thought I would take the role of the friend via phone messages and have the character be mute, but when my wife wanted to give a hand with her acting skills, it opened a lot of doors in terms of character and gameplay. I used iZotope RX in order to make the VO stand out and be crisp, while also having it believable that one of the characters is being recorded through a phone
what i learned
a lot
This project was the first time I had a clear idea in my head I wanted to execute. From the inception of how the story and narrative would play out to being hands-on with every part of the process like the coding, asset and scene management, audio design, post-processing, lighting and even pacing, I gained an enormous amount of understanding of how not only these processes work by themselves, but also how they connect and communicate. I also kept coming back to how the things I was showing (and the details) would be communicated to the player (and if they were communicated correctly). Overall I am very proud of having accomplished this — seeing all the feedback from the thousands of people who played and watched playthroughs made me realize that my creative ideas, alongside dedication and discipline, are not as impossible to create as I originally thought. I also learned people don’t like spiders :)