Silk Fly Devlog

Silk Fly was created for the GMTK 2021 Game Jam themed "Joined Together". The first step was to decide on what to make for the given theme. I looked at a brief set of examples in the game jam trailer -- a big ball that gathers stuff, or some creatures literally tethered together. A bunch of ideas went through my head like ants holding together to form a raft or a tick or flea attached to some animal, and even one idea that I almost ran with was an ameba in a petridish and it would have to grow/divide to solve certain puzzles. But the one that kept stewing and coming back was a fly stuck to the web of a spider. The fly has to navigate an area while tethered and coax the spider into traps to free itself.

Once I had settled on the idea, I sent a request out for anyone who wanted to join in. Very quickly a team was formed between myself, Blu, and Elisha.

As usual, I made just about everything in the game within the given time; characters, props, and assets, textures, etc. The music was done in about 14 hours -- Elisha is just fantastic. All I have to do is send him a few screen shots and he somehow makes gold out of it. The title screen, buttons and UI elements were handled by Blu who, despite a few hiccups with technology, came through in record time.

The most challenging part for me was the rope physics for the silk strand. I originally made a custom rope in Maya and setup the physics in Unreal but I couldn't get it to attach to two actors in the way that I wanted. I ultimately had to ditch the approach for Unreal's cord actor which does its job.

There are some minor issues that I couldn't get to in time for the jam. I mean, I probably could have but Murphy's law and all, I decided to play it safe and submit a playable game with a few minor things that only I would likely notice. Those are: the spider's head doesn't move with some of the animations, and the fly's wing doesn't flap; they are supposed to but some bones didn't register on import and their animations got dropped. I'll have to figure out why later.