The project
Welcome, new intern, to the shop of the great Sebastian the spider. Here, he sells butterflies to all spiders across the globe. You are now tasked to take over his shop. Can you keep his legacy alive, and catch, prepare and deliver your butterflies as fast as he did?
In this game, you catch 4 types of butterflies in the garden, each with their own flying pattern. After catching them, you can go down to the basement to kill them and complete orders from your customers. If you take too long between two orders, you lose.
The game features a story mode with dialoge from Sebastian, and an endless mode where you can try and complete as many orders as possible.
It was made for the Learn you a game jam: pixel edition. The theme for this jam was “you are the monster”. The game won 3rd place out of 42 entries!
My contribution
This game was made by me and Gust right after the exam period at the end of the fourth semester. Me and Gust first brainstormed together and afterwards I mainly did programming and anything Unity-related while Gust did art and music.
I made this game together with Gust De Logi. He had never made a game before, and I decided it would be a great idea to immedeately dive in deep and participate in a weeklong game jam. Our plan was to work on it for 3 days and use the remaining time for polish and bugfixing (this was a very generous timeframe since it was Gust’s first ever game).
Here are some of the main things I’ve learned from this project:
- Polish is everything:
Because of the scope and time we had to make the game, I was able to add quite a lot of polish to the game. The polish made the game really stand out when people were reviewing games for the jam, and I think it was a very big factor in us scoring so high. - Tweening is awesome:
I used tweening for almost every animation in the game (that didn’t use multiple sprites) and it just looks so good with minimal effort. I’d used tweens before but never to this extent, and I could never go back. - Teaching people is fun:
Seeing Gust make so much progress over such little time was super rewarding.
The idea for the game actually came to me right before the first brainstorming session. I had a shower thought (literally) about this game where you capture butterflies and then imprison them in the dungeon.
During brainstorming with Gust, we reformed that idea into what the game is now. We still had a lot of questions left though:
- Does the game have levels or do we use a timer?
- What is the pattern of each type of butterfly and how do we kill them?
- How do we recognize each type of butterfly? Colors, shape, wings, patterns…?
- What will be the exact mechanic for killing butterflies?
A lot of these things were actually decided during development. I think this was a case where we had the main idea and kind of started “chasing the fun” (for example: having multiple timers was not that fun, so we opted for only one).
We mainly used miro to note down our ideas during this process.
Coding this game felt like a pretty daunting task to me. This was not my first rodeo, but I really wanted to keep my game jam code clean (for once). I also wanted to focus a lot on polish, so the systems of the game had to be easily linkable to the visuals.
One of my concerns for this project was the butterfly behaviours. They are really simple, but different for every butterfly and all connected. I can code clicking on a butterfly 5 times easily, but coding the clicking which affects the spawning which affects 100 other things is a lot harder. I decided to use model classes for the butterflies. I divided the butterflies into 4 states they could be in: flying, flying in the dungeon, being dead, and being inside an order. Using model classes and states, I could easily edit the behaviours of the different types.
I wanted the main gameloop to be implemented by day 3, so I had the rest of my time for polishing and bugfixing (this actually worked out too, hooray for planning!).
- On the first day, I focused on implementing the garden and the different butterflies in it.
- On the second day, I added the dungeon and butterflies flying in it. You could also kill the blue and green butterflies already.
- Third day was a real speedrunning day. I did so much on that day. I finished the gameloop by adding in kill methods for the yellow and red butterfly and an order system that could scale up in difficulty. I added a lot of the sprites made by Gust during the previous days. I added particle effects to the butterflies and the garden. I added sound effects. At the end of the third day, the game was already feeling like a real game.
- The fourth day was a slow day again. I only managed to add in a dialogue box and some scrolling text. I did learn a lot about leantween though. Oh how I’ve come to love it so much. This one (or DOTween I guess) is a real requirement for any unity developer. It added so much polish.
- I started working on the menus and implemented the story on the fifth day.
- The final day was mostly spent on bugfixing.
Overall, I will say I didn’t learn that many new things programming wise BUT every project is some new experience gained.
Call it feature creep or whatever, but our simple tutorial quickly grew into a fully fledged story mode. I mean, we DID manage to complete the jam in time, right? I decided to make the slightly comedic and slightly dark character Sebastian the spider, who would say things to you during the game.
I think one of the things we both succeeded very well in was providing feedback to each other aubout our ideas. Since Gust was new, I was initially pretty scared that he would not receive feedback well or that he wouldn’t give any feedback to me. I think he far exceeded my expectations in that regard. He didn’t take feedback personal and applied it where needed. He also gave a lot of feedback to me in terms of game feel etc.
I think we both pulled our weight in terms of communication and feedback.
Credits
This game was made by me and Gust De Logi over the course of 1 week. We had an absolute blast making it!
Made by:
- Gust De Logi
- Art
- Music
- Design
- Joran De Pessemier
- Programming
- Writing
- Design
Special thanks to:
- Lili the dog
- Emotional support
Resources used:
