Corbin Supak

Arachnoid

“Arachnoid” presents a spider hero whose kingdom is under assault from other beasts.

The arcade classic, Tempest, was a game I played regularly but never quite placed in a particular universe. The game certainly suggests outer space, especially as you ‘warp’ through the stars between levels, but your Player Character (PC), the yellow thingy you see here, never seems much like the ‘spaceship’ it is supposed to be. To me, it seems more like an insect – angular, crawling all around things, ignoring gravity, quick and defensive, wiry, almost faceless.

“Arachnoid” presents a spider hero whose kingdom is under assault from other beasts. The basic gameplay of Tempest would remain, but one obvious variation is that a cobweb has more lateral patterns, and thus the game space could cover more territory than just the perimeter. The spider PC has to eliminate its enemies - mow down the ‘Red Ants’ (Tempest’s ‘Flippers’), avoid the ‘shock’ attacks of toxic projectiles (like Tempest’s ‘Pulsar’ and ‘Fuseball’ enemies), and survive the carnage long enough to spin a line to the next web.

Called a ‘tube shooter,’ Tempest was an early attempt at 3-D perspective. Each level presents a polygon that you scuttle around the perimeter of as enemies emerge from the center. The visual effect is very much like a cobweb. All charactersmove in ways that are orchestrated by the cobweb geometry – either up and down a long channel, or around the perimeter.

The goal is to shoot all enemies and then survive the warp by avoiding or shooting down spikes left behind by some enemies. Being a quarter-feeder, there is no win condition, only prolonged gameplay until failure.

A further variation could involve the gradual destruction of the web during the fighting. Some enemies may chew into the material and cause the geometry to begin to destruct. This rule would have the emergent quality of changing the game space dynamically, during the level, and this would also give the spider a reason to have to move to another web.

One difficult thing to establish here is - why are enemies emerging from the center of the web? Perhaps we could reverse the roles and have the spiders as the enemies? I think you could try that, but for me, the critical factor is that your PC must be quite nimble on the web surface, and so it seems like the PC would be a spider-like character.

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