I made a game called The Spider Who Would Only Eat Candy
I was playing around with hexagons based on this Gamasutra article and this article by Red Blob.
James Earl Cox III, who said “Make the games you want to see on public access television.” which is pretty close to my design philosophy, also asked if anyone wanted to be his nemesis, and I never had a nemesis before, that’d be cool.
I played a game about an elevator he made, and there was a spider in it, though I got the spider twice in a row so I thought it was more prominent than it really is. So that combined in my head with the hex grid, and so that inspired this game to be about the spider.
I get jumping spiders in my apartment, so the idea of a spider hopping around the board made sense to me. I was sort of thinking of knight’s tours puzzles with chess, but to mix it up, you’d have different jumping patterns according to random cards and you would choose which ones and the order. It was only while I was half-way through making the game that I saw the similarity to RoboRally.
I also added interstitials that told a very basic story, which is the first time I tried something like that.