Happy New Year folks, it’s been a manic one for me, I’ve spent a shit ton of time working on Bug Game instead of spending time with family or praying, or whatever it is you holy types do. If you’re here reading this, nice one, friend – make sure to drink some water today and stretch your back.
What Changed
- I’ve redesigned the Quest System, and I’m really proud of it. I’ll get into more detail about what that looks like, as it’s going to be the topic of the deep dive, but the whole thing now has a progression system and structure in a way that rewards the player – no longer does it just give them stuff to do.
- I’ve finished the tutorial – it’s still a bit janky and needs some polish and some TLC, but the tutorial now has a clear step at each stage. It teaches the player how to catch a bug, prompts them to open the encyclopedia, then explains quests, rewards them with a lure, teaches them how to use the lure, and finally uses that success of that lure to grant the last reward of the tutorial and open up the rest of the game. I’ve got it set where a tutorial GameObject sits in place until the player completes it, which is stored in the player’s save data. That means the game knows to not show the tutorial whenever the player opens the game after they’ve completed it.
- I’ve added a bunch of bugs to the game, and when I say a bunch, I mean 15 more of them. That means there’s currently 40 catchable bugs. I’m getting some movement now. In terms of drawings, I’ve got a nice Photoshop document where I draw them, with nearly 700 layers in there, three of which are named. This makes me the king of organisation.
- I built a rarity system and unlock gating systems. Basically, every bug can fall into one of 5 categories [Common, Uncommon, Rare, Really Rare, Mythic]. I’ll get more into detail below on how these unlocks work, but the player must unlock those higher rarities by catching more bugs as they play. I think Viva Piñata did something similar to this, where instead of locking rarer, more special critters behind parts of the map, you lock them behind progression in one single space.
- I created Swarm Systems, which is a pretty neat addition if you ask me. I might do a deep dive on these in the future. The idea is that swarms can randomly kick in in the game (there are spawning rules for these, and there is a forgiveness mechanic, where if you play for a while and don’t generate a swarm, the game will increase in likelihood to give you one, sort of an invisible hand to make the game more fun). Swarms spawn a bunch of critters of the same category (I added categories, forgot to mention that), all of the common rarity. You have a set amount of time to catch them all, and the reward is the spawning of a rarer bug. Makes it worth doing, you see? The cool thing about this is that I found a use for the greenhouse. You’ll be able to listen to the radio, which will announce where a spawn is about to appear and give a countdown.
- Redesigned Shiny Rarity System, which I spent all of today doing. Previously, I had a model back from the 3D model days, where different rarities would kick in [bronze, silver, gold, iridescent]. As you catch more of a specific species of bug, your chances of rarer colours would kick in. The idea was that for collectors, this stuff would be like crack, and they’d want to catch iridescent bugs of every type. There’s still potential for this, but it’s not a gacha game, so I don’t want it to be a core component. See, I’ve now adjusted this to fit the 2D Sprite model that I’m using. I’ve created a shader that recolours the sprites, and a snazzy new shader on top of that, which gives a super mario starman type effect with a shifting hue for the iridescent spawns. There’s glitter as well; they look really cool. I’ve also now implemented this into the encyclopedia, so there are a few cute little buttons that let the player toggle views on bugs. This’ll work well in the future when I want to introduce hats for the bugs, and I will want to give players the ability to toggle.
Deep Dive – Quest Systems
This is possibly the most game-designery thing that I’ve done in a little while for Bug Game. I ended the last dev log by taking about making the players actually want to continue playing. The big question was that collecting alone isn’t enough to sustain play, and that sent me down a rabbit hole of reward systems and gambling psychology and all that jazz. Then, I realised that this is my game and I can make it how I want, and that includes putting silly things in. Silly things like mind-controlling bugs or speaking to them.
And thus, a metaphorical door was opened in my mind. I needed to find a way to grant rewards that increase player agency, not just numbers in a “caught” stat.
I approached this from two angles. I first listed the type of play that I wanted to encourage in players: Catching different species, catching lots of bugs, and using lures to affect spawning. The 3 core gameplay loops. Then, I moved to the other side, and thought about how to reward the player with play.
For Track A, the species route, I wanted to reward exploration with more exploration. Completing your bug encyclopedia grants you more bugs to find. For Track B, catching quantities, I wanted to reward the player with toys. I wanted to encourage the player to enjoy catching bugs themselves, rather than just having to catch the bugs as a means to an end. This led to fun ideas for toys, such as a ping system to find specific species, or mind-controlling bugs to access new parts of the map. For Track C, I wanted to reward understanding of the game, so I literally put forward the idea of understanding the bugs. At first it may just be emojis, or simple words like FOOD, but then it may progress to deep conversations between bugs, and philosophical ideas such as “dishwashers are really great”.
I’ve got a simplified version of the quest layout below. I’ve stripped it down to not give away all the cool stuff I’ve got planned just yet, as there are a few components in there that would be fun to discover without prompting.
To implement this, I built a gating system, where completing quests activates a feature ID flag. The idea is that I can call on these flags later on and gate features behind those quests. It was a big, messy endeavour, and I did some weird stuff while I was working on the tutorial to class certain quests as milestone quests, and that whole thing broke when I tried to set up the tutorial to only show tutorial quests.
I’m also toying with daily quests and a monetisation strategy through premium quests. The plan would be to take a small token payment from players, call it £0.99/month (a bit like a tip jar), that would unlock extra daily challenges + cosmetics quests.
That might change, though. I’ve realised when watching people play that my original idea of this being a quick 5-10 minute daily game might not be apt. Instead, it might be more likely that people bomb through the content, and either get bored with it, or finish it one rush over a few days. I suppose it’s the difference between Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. Both should be directly injected into my veins, but both are different styles of addiction.
What I’m doing next
I need the map to be more fun to explore. At the moment, there are a few nice spots, but other than that, it’s a large flat plane with some paths drawn on it. I need to consider garden design, forest design, and level design. I’ve also realised that the setup I have at the moment does actually allow hills, something that for whatever reason I had not considered. I have an early design laid out of what I think the map will look like, but I expect this might change in the future.
I still need to pad out the animation system, and that involves creating a system that spawns bugs with their specific animations. I think I need to create a “fly in” and a “dig in” animation, which I can toggle. When a bug first spawns, it’ll either animate its position in from off-screen or animate some little dig up animation. I also need idle frames for each bug (two will do, for now), walking steps (only one direction needed, because I just flip them, Paper Mario style), and some form of action, which can be unique to each bug. Just something to show a little character. Once this is done, it’ll be a lot of doodling to get the entire set.
I also want to figure out how to set spawners with spawn percentages rather than just a list of bugs that can spawn. This means that I can prompt rarity within rarity tiers. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I think a rarer spawn in a specific spot might feel better for the player to push them into exploring the map more.
For now though, I’m going to look away from my screen for a bit and watch Parks and Rec.
| 28/12/2025 | Added steps prefab |
| added bench and side table prefab | |
| added bird bath prefab | |
| added mushroom prefab | |
| planned rarity distribution and applied rarities to everything in BugList | |
| Padded out planning for game progression quests | |
| 30/12/2025 | built rarity progression system |
| added raritytier to dropdowns for buginfo | |
| BugDetailUI now displays RarityDisplayName instead of the old bug.rarity text field | |
| Added a new save value: unlockedSpawnTierMax (defaults to Common). | |
| Updated BugSpawner so bugs won’t spawn if their BugInfo.rarityTier is higher than unlockedSpawnTierMax | |
| Added a new quest reward type: UnlockSpawnTier | |
| Quests can now specify which tier to unlock (Uncommon/Rare/Really Rare/Mythic). | |
| Only the first milestone in a chain auto-appears (the one with no previousQuestId) | |
| Added Feature ID rewards to quests to be unlocked later | |
| Savedata.cs now has a place to store unlocked upgrades: playerProgress.unlockedFeatures. | |
| built quests for all catch/Track B milestones, linked up | |
| built quests for lure/Track C milestones linked up | |
| built placeholder for swarm mechanic in quests | |
| changed Track C milestones to need any item instead of specific | |
| added category to bugdata | |
| Added swarm spawners | |
| Introduced swarms: | |
| SwarmZone.cs: defines a zone (id/name/radius), detects “inside zone”. | |
| SwarmDirector.cs: schedules swarms, supports debug “Force schedule”. | |
| SwarmSpawnerSwarm.cs: runs an active swarm, spawns extra bugs (additive), counts catches inside zone & category, spawns a “reward bug” when win condition met. | |
| added radio feature – blurts out if spawns are happening nearby | |
| RadioSwarmAnnouncer.cs + RadioSpeechBubble.cs: radio announces pending swarm when player is nearby (world bubble + optional screen fallback). | |
| added swarm unlock to Track C Milestones | |
| Drew bagworm idle1/idle2 and cockchafer | |
| ran swarm completion checks into progress tracking | |
| added bagworm, plus idle animation | |
| made radio speak look pretty with speechbubble | |
| Added UI heads up completion bar for swarms – SwarmProgressHUD.cs | |
| 01/01/2026 | fixed tutorial not classing woodlouse as a catch |
| unflagged tutorial woodlouse as bug to prevent accidental catching | |
| added camera movement to tutorial and added functionality to move the camera to specific spot | |
| added prompt icon to tutorial in encylcopedia, and added secondary text after viewing woodlouse | |
| set up tutorialstep manager to clear tutorial on completion | |
| added prompt icon to quest panel | |
| set up quests to allow multiple subsequent quests after completion | |
| added prompt icon to inventory panel and text boxes explaining | |
| changed lures to have more variety with spawning and a new “first spawn” rule | |
| added completion of tutorial mechanism | |
| 02/01/2026 | Added Bug02Millipede |
| 03/02/2026 | Added: |
| 19Grasshopper | |
| 20Cricket | |
| 21Locust | |
| 22JerusalemCricket | |
| 57Silkworm | |
| 75Leafcutter | |
| 76FireAnt | |
| 77Termite | |
| 83Damselfly | |
| 84Dragonfly | |
| 87HarvestmanSpider | |
| 33Cockchafer | |
| Added Pigeon Idle Animation | |
| cleaned up and renamed all existing bug sprite names | |
| Built shiny shader graph and material | |
| Added shiny/iri debug to spawners | |
| Added shiny and iri preview icon to bug journal |