The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Thomas]

e know FG always wanted to implement spiders in their games, with those assets in the TDD files that hint at spiders originally being in the game but were later dropped.

A year or so into development of Amnesia we had spiders that could climb walls and ceiling and then jump on the player. I spent a lot of time with that code, but never got it really stable. We thought of using the spiders like a critter (like the fish, rats and cockroaches), but it was a bit too unstable for that too. So we just used in in a vision that you have like 30% of seeing when playing the game. Also worth noting is that the spider is the same the one in Penumbra, and I think it is the only resource from Penumbra that we used in Amnesia (apart from some sounds).

What I really wanted to do is something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1P_B65XW4I

I am kind of obsessed with the idea with just using a ridiculous amount of cpu resources just to do IK, AI, etc for that sort of thing. It just turns out that stuff is really, really hard and I have never time to dig into it enough to make it work nicely. There is also a problem of "domino complexity" here in that if one thing is highly dynamic, then that means other things also need that same complexity, and on it goes. So you often end up with a lot of small bugs, that often cascade and make everything not possible to use.

This is actually what happened with the really advanced character body, that were intended for Amnesia. I outlined it here:
http://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-2141.html

In the end we just ended up using the same thing + tweaks that we used in Amnesia. So moral of the story is Keep It Simple Stupid.

What was I talking about again? Ah, spiders!

Fun thing about spiders is that in Penumbra: Overture we noticed how the mac and linux version had some problems a bit into the mines. Our porter, Edward, had played it so we could not understand how he had not missed it. Turns out he is really afraid of spiders and stopped playing when he saw signs of those and just hoped there were no more bugs to fix.