PSBlog Feed: Real World Time and Weather in Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon

[Commander Fury]

Imagine you’re riding the bus and playing a great game on your PS Vita. The bus drives into a rain cloud, and… can that be? Now it’s raining inside the game! Later at home, thanks to the one-two punch of Cross Buy and Cloud Save, you pick up where you left off on your PS4. And when the sun sets outside your window, it becomes night in the level you were just playing! That’s what happens in our upcoming game, Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon, thanks to the positional features of PS Vita and PS4.

 

In Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon, out soon for PS4 and PS Vita, you play a jumping spider. You can walk on walls and ceilings, jump, and use your silk to create threads. Draw any shape with those threads and it’ll form a web, which is how you catch the variety of insects found at each location. As you make your way from room to room, you’ll slowly realize that you’re exploring an abandoned estate, one riddled with mysteries, clues, and puzzles. Like any good spider, you leave the place covered in cobwebs.

Time and weather matter when on the hunt for bugs. At night, the fireflies and crickets emerge while moths circle around lights. When it rains, mosquitoes come out and inchworms dangle by threads. On a clear day, you might smack a hornet nest to do battle with its defenders, or carefully craft a strong web, required to trap the largest insects. And what dictates whether it’s day or night, rain or shine? The real world. Once you give your permission, the game determines where you are, looks up the time of day and current weather, and mirrors those in the game. So when the sun rises or the rain falls outside your window, the same thing happens inside your game at the mysterious Blackbird Estate.

 

Time and weather even affect the story and puzzles. Obviously a spider can’t crawl up the water spout when the rain is washing down. The windmill is so old that the sails don’t spin all the way around unless it’s raining, so to explore the whole thing wait until rain falls in real life. If you’re impatient you can use the weather device, but choose carefully — the weather device and time machine give you control, but only one of them can be used per real world moon phase. Moon phase? Yes indeed, Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon tracks that too, and you’ll need to be on your best spider sleuthing game to determine how moon phase impacts the deepest, most hidden puzzles and snatch up that Platinum Trophy!

There have been a handful of video games, some of them really great, that use your real world information to create gameplay. We were inspired by those, but we wanted to push it further than we’d seen before. Each of the game’s thirty levels can be played in all four possible conditions, each a new combination of insects, secrets, and features, each with its own leaderboard to track which player has truly mastered Spider’s deep scoring system in that environment. We hope that Spider draws you in, that once you’ve been through Blackbird Estate a first time, you’ll eagerly reach for your PlayStation when you notice those raindrops falling outside your window, to follow up on a clue, go for a high score, or just to see what happens in the Graveyard on a rainy night…

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