Alright here’s the dealio. I’m starting a devlog after I’ve already been working on this game for months. Main reason behind is because it’s now starting to look a little bit like a videogame, and I’m sat here kicking myself for not starting writing this earlier.
Anything not saved will be lost. – Nintendo Wii
So, effective from today I’ll be doing this devlogs every few weeks. I’m splitting them into a few easy sections so I don’t have to think too hard:
- What changed (3 bullets)
- One deep dive (a problem – what I tried – what shipped)
- What I’m working on next
- AOB
- Devlog
If you want to find out more about what Bug Game actually is, have a cheeky look over here.
What Changed
I’ve started building a tutorial. When a player loads up the game for the first time, they’ll be greeted with a single critter in front of them. As they walk towards it, the tutorial introduces basic features. I’m not done with this yet, nor am I happy with it. I’m a big believer that the greatest tutorial ever created was World 1-1, where the player character is presented at the bottom left side of the screen, and the controls have a D-pad and two action buttons. Perfection. Any tutorial that uses text to explain itself is a bad tutorial, and my tutorial currently has text.
Killed a bug. I had this really stupid thing where clicking on a bug in the encyclopedia would open up the entry for the next bug in the list after the selected bug. So if centipedes are bug 25 and moths are bug 26, if I click on centipedes, the entry for moths would open. I’ve had this problem for what feels like forever, right when I first added the encyclopedia to the game. Turns out I was reading both the player input as the tap to open the detail page, and somehow also reading that as a swipe, so they’d both play at the same time and switch the entry to the wrong one.
Pivoted to hand-drawn sprites. Previously, all my bugs were 3D models. I hadn’t done any real modeling before, so I learnt blender and built a few little guys that I was pretty happy with, but I realised that nobody apart from entomology fans would actually give a shit about these critters. Pokémon are collectable, and I was looking for something that would make players want to catch them all (no-copyright infringement intended). At one point, I tried replacing the encyclopedia entry preview model with a sprite, so I drew a little placeholder in Photoshop, and all of a sudden, my fiancée’s eyes lit up. This thing was friend-shaped, and now she wanted it. And thus, I’ve started parsing through every bug planned for the game and turning them into little hand-drawn sprites.
Deep Dive – Movement Systems
I’m going to talk about the movement system. Up until recently, my movement system was really basic. Each insect picked a NavMeshAgent, and picked a spot somewhere within a specific range of itself, then moved over to that spot. Then, it picked another spot and moved over there, and so on, and so on.
This was fine and all, it made sure that in playtesting they were moving around, but it looked robotic and unnatural, so I started figuring out a more complex movement system that I’d be able to edit on a per-bug basis. The idea being that I can hop into Unity’s Inspector and decide to make any bug faster, or more erratic, more docile, or even in the newest version – fly!
I needed a way to describe every type of insect movement, so broke down the definitions into the following list:
- Move speed / acceleration / stopping distance
- Idle time (min/max)
- Optional move time limit (min/max)
- Optional mid-move pauses (interval + duration ranges)
- Per-instance variation
- Flying options
There are supposed to be 100 bugs in this game, and they all need to show some sort of personality when moving around, so I wanted to create some form of modular system that I could easily edit. I won’t lie, coding is the bane of my existence, so anything that I’m going to edit more than once, I’ll do in the inspector if I can.
I’ve already found that centipedes and birdwings zip across the map far faster than slugs and snails, so the system works. It just needs a lot of tweaking.
I also had a very interesting mistake that’s got me thinking about an additional movement system that might sit alongside this one. I’ve been adding a pigeon into the game, as this dumb little bit of life that sits on a bridge and flies away when the player gets near. I used a bug as a placeholder while I figured out the code to make it fly away when the player got near. As I walked towards the bug, expecting it to fly into the air as the pigeon would, it instead ran away from me. See, I’d forgotten to disable it’s RandomMovement script, so it was stuck to the NavMesh, moving around without being able to leave the ground, so it’s janky erratic movements as it tried to fly away from me felt like it was running, and I took chase!
I imagine I’ll explore this further in the future; it was a lot more fun to chase after a bug, and combining this with the different sensitivities and characteristics I’ve described above could keep it fresh for players who might otherwise be bored of just running after PNGs around the map. There is of course, the view of making some bugs dangerous, though I’m not sure if I’m set on this idea yet.
What I’m doing next
I need to figure out the rest of the questing system. There’s got to be an actual reason for the player to keep playing, something external rather than just wanting to collect the bugs. I think there’s room for a progression system, where more species get unlocked as you complete more quests, or grant access to items that the player can use to spawn in specific critters.
I also need to finish the animation system. There’s currently idle animations for 2 bugs, and no walking, spawn, despawn, nor action animations. In all honesty, I think this one here might be one of the biggest distractions, because it’s not getting me closer to a beta version of the game, but I can doodle while watching stranger things whenever Steve isn’t on screen, so it works for me.
I’m also padding out the map some more. There’s a lot left to do, and I’m finding it increasingly unmotivating to scroll through Pinterest, stealing ideas for back gardens. I really don’t want to make parts of the map locked behind gates, I dig the idea of it being completely open from the start, but not completely understood or filled by the player.
Finally, I’ll need to start planning the spawning systems. At the moment, I just have a couple of spawners around the map with a list of prefabs that can be spawned. The prefabs in question are all hooked into the BugDatabase, where I store their main information.
| 15/11/2025 | made bug_woodlouse |
| disalbed Regions in Scene (this breaks rocks) | |
| fixed quest UI Spacing | |
| added quest UI item backdrop | |
| added textbox popup | |
| added tutorial section child | |
| added woodlouse tutorial movement | |
| added woodlouse alert symbol plus distance alert mechanic | |
| added tutorial messages | |
| added tutorial arrow for encyclopedia | |
| made woodhouse tutorial version with message on catch | |
| made lampost | |
| made tutorial rock that gives message on lifting and made it only spawn woodlousetutorial | |
| added lift delay to rock interactable script | |
| 18/11/2025 | added ColourGrade Global Volume |
| Added Fujifake LUT to game | |
| 22/11/2025 | added bridge model to game and built prefab |
| Added River using Polaris | |
| Added hitbox above River | |
| Added pots to game (5 prefabs) | |
| changed height on sample tree near spawn | |
| changed tree leaves for leaf planes | |
| 23/11/2025 | added ferns to greenhouse |
| 11/12/2025 | Pivoted to 2D sprites |
| Stag Beetle | |
| Rhino Beetle | |
| Added Diving Beetle | |
| Added Goliath Beetle | |
| Added Animation system for Sprites | |
| 12/12/2025 | added sortinglayer for water bugs – set diving beetle to display properly over water |
| 15/12/2025 | added FlyAwayFromPlayer script and created placeholder pigeon prefab |
| 17/12/2025 | Added madagascan sunset moth |
| created new order for numbers based on context | |
| renamed all prefabs to have new number order | |
| Renamed all bugdata to include new number | |
| set new numbers for bugs in all places | |
| Added elephant beetle | |
| added cabbage butterfly | |
| improved movement system for bugs (now added flying options and editable movement) | |
| Added Monarch | |
| Added pond | |
| 18/12/2025 | Fixed incorrect bug opening in encyclopedia: mouse click used to open the bug also triggered the swipe detection in Update(), so the detail screen immediately advanced to the next bug. |
| Added: | |
| tardigrade | |
| centipede | |
| birdwing | |
| peacock | |
| added basic splashscreen | |
| 21/12/2025 | Drew idle frames for bugs |
| 22/12/2025 | Added to game: |
| Bug04Slug | |
| Bug045LeopardSlug | |
| Bug06Snail | |
| 24/12/2025 | Added to game: |
| Bug07PondSnail | |
| Bug08GiantAfricanSnail | |
| Bug32Ladybird | |
| Bug59CinnabarMoth | |
| Bug60HummingbirdHawkmoth | |
| Bug61DeathsHeadHawkmoth | |
| Fixed bugs not stepping on grass (flagged grass as ignore and rebaked mesh) | |
| Switched the grass bend input from a per-material _PlayerPos to a global _PlayerPosGlobal set each frame, so all grass correctly reads the player position and bends. | |
| tried to make bugs influence grass (failed) : GrassBend.shader, BugInfluencer.cs, GrassInfluenceManager.cs, GrassBender.cs | |
| added PlantDateSpriteSwitcher to change plant sprites based on months | |
| Adde prefabs and set appearance dates: | |
| pumpkin | |
| pepper | |
| brocoli | |
| corn | |
| cucumber | |
| asparagus | |
| Added Lilypads | |
| Added Rain 2 music | |
| fixed lilypad shader | |
| 25/12/2025 | Added Bug35GiraffeWeevil |
| Set missing bug icon (BugJournalEntry prefab) | |
| Fixed river height problem | |
| added reeds |