There’s not terribly much to say, we decided to add it roughly at the start of June, which may sound like a long time ago but in order to implement it, it’s last minute.
The gameplay design was briefly mentioned in the FFF. We wanted to have it be a proper feature, not just “lol it has legs”, which is why it remained a meme until now. Some FFFs ago I wrote this to make people understand it’s not coming https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=484584#p484584 ... and having written the post, it got me to think one night about it, and it just connected to me that if it were remote controllable, it could build things using equipment grid with roboport, or kill things with PLD. I mentioned it to others half-jokingly because I was well aware our todo list is already full enough. But we decided to add it. :) I was hoping it could also be a moving turret to have more than just PLD when without driver, so we spoke about it and Twinsen made it work.
The graphics were fairly straight forward. Of course the leg drawing was a big technical mystery as inserter drawing surely wasn’t the best possible option. So we invented a system of stretchable & non-stretchable parts with posila.
The biggest thing to capitalize on is that the torso/c*ckpit does rotate to show direction of moving, but the bottom does not. This means every leg is always mounted in a predefined position and can be treated individually with unique sprites. So I made every leg differently rotated, skewed, and lit by lights from a different direction, abusing Blender’s group instances like crazy.
The stretchable parts have the springs, those were added half-jokingly but then when I saw it look very natural with the up and down movement the spider does when idle, it was clear they stay. They could be modelled more properly but there was no more time for perfection.
I think it already admits that these parts stretch, and makes it clear rather than hide it.
The c*ckpit rotation has one more cool detail - as I said it’s oriented to the direction of travel, not shooting. This means we needed to choose a weapon that could shoot in any direction and have the projectile home to the target - thanks to the projectile tangent thing we merged as a pull request from one of our fans with source access! It’s also why the spider has eyes in various directions, not just forward - to shoot anywhere.
And we added a fun recipe to top it all off. The fish is special but I will keep that for myself for now, some things are worth keeping a mystery. :)
This is already ridiculously more descriptive than I would make an eventual FFF so I hope this satisfies you :P
devtrackers.gg
