BUGHUNT

Bughunt is a game in which you are put in the mind of a programmer working on a deadline trying to rid their code of bugs.

Gameplay video:

bughunt gameplay vid

project link: Bughunt itch io page

Concept and ideas

Base Concept:

This project was the end of the year project for my first year in Game Design as such it was meant as a way to put to the test all we had learned throughout the year.

The idea for the game came from my own experience of hunting down bugs in my code.

Ideas:

Smash the bugs

Because of the other definition of bugs(and its common symbol) I made the bugs that need to be removed actual insects that crawl around the game area. The fly swatter is mainly for comedy purposes.

Rubber duck for speed

Whether you actually do it or not doesn’t matter most programmers know of the rubber duck method that consists in explaining your code to said duck. Doing so should help the programmer realize where the error in the code is. Doens’t need to be a rubber duck but they are cute.

Development

The development of bughunt was true to its name an actual bughunt. Mainly due to the fact that I was trying out new things while making it.

The challenges

Collision or trigger?

At the start of the project I had forgotten that triggers don’t actually interact with each other, this then took me a while to realize and I then had to work around how to pick up the error messages that get dropped by the bugs. The solution at the time made due to the fact I was running out of time is that the error block aren’t walkthrough and you need to click to pick them up.

How to add a video?

During the game there is this bugged control screen on the top right of the screen. In actuality it is just a looping video but at the time I didn’t know how to properly implement videos in the game. A few google searches later and some toying around with the UI and I had a decent enough result for what I wanted. This was also added later on as a bonus and I wanted to see if I could get it to work.

progress bars

The progress bars in the game were all made using sliders, but for some reason even at full value the slider alway leaves a small area empty. Working around it was really frustrating as I kept messing it up. But I did get it to work in the end for later games and projects I made.