Nice little update here as I’ve finally got Bug Speak added to the game, and I’ve spent some time figuring out how I go about making the map feel more grounded in reality.
What changed
I recently watched a video by [username], in which he pointed out that the map design in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II had managed to achieve such a keen replication of reality by stacking tall grass with bushes and trees. He’s absolutely right, and I was so inspired that I started working on a way to improve the environment in Bug Game. See, when I worked on the world map, I dove in and designed it like a theme park, not considering the reality of ecology. Simple things that sound silly, like “water flows down” and “hills erode”.
To work on this, I needed to improve my nature models, while keeping them mobile-friendly. I found this great tutorial with a pretty nifty idea. Turn the faces of a 3D model into camera-facing billboards. I created a similar shader with some simplifications. For example, no alpha textures are used, just a self-generating circle. Additionally, simple wind using a sine wave (and quite a bit of maths), makes the whole thing feel really alive. I’ve also built a few new trunks that fit the world much better.
I’ve also added some nice animations to the UI, which I worked on last week, so they all slide in and out on screen. I’ll be adding sound effects to these in the future, too.
And, the big one – Bug Speak is now in the game. That’s right, you can listen to bugs – if you’re attuned enough. More below!
Deep Dive – Bug Speak
Bug Speak emerged as one of those whimsical ideas a few weeks ago when I realised that this is my game, and I can do what I want with it. Specifically, around features that the player might unlock during questlines. Bug Speak allows players to listen to what bugs are saying, and it’s a skill that improves with experience. For example, at the beginning, Bug Speech might be limited to simple words “huh”, “oh”, “hungry”, “olive?”, but over time will progress into my complex thoughts, such as “I wonder how people came up with names for trees. Like, did they just look at one and say “Yep, that’s a birch?””
The way this all fits together is pretty simple. There is a prefab that includes a speech bubble, and some text, and I access that whenever I want to place a speechbubble on top of a bug. BugSpeechBank holds a directory of monologue lines, split up into 4 classes of complexity. The player unlocks higher levels of complexity through quests. BugSpeechManager then collects this information, picks a line, and spawns UI bubbles.
FloatingSpeechBubble ensures that the speech bubble updates everyframe based on where the bug is on the screen. Finally, to tie this all together, BugSpeechEmitter sits on each bug prefab to allow it to speak. I can vary the amount of speech by including a check every x seconds, and then give it a percentage chance of generating some Bug Speak. This means it’s dead simple for me to plug in variations to this chance in the future, if I want to include items (like, perhaps, a hearing aid), that increases the likelyhood that the player will witness a bug having a little think outloud.
There is potential in the future to expand this into monologues, but for now, I think it’s just a neat little addition to the game that fills it with a bit of whimsy and allows me to give hints to the player should I wish.
What I’m doing next
Alright, thinking about it, I’m not that excited about a lot of the upcoming bits, but the sooner I get them done, the better. I need to set up this Animation Framework. I also now need to set up the rest of the Speech Emitters on all the prefabs.
I also need to start building up quest features. I’ve been playing Vampire Survivor recently, and found out that the creator, Luca Galante has a background in gambling, which absolutely tracks. This game is addictive, and the thing that’s really springing out to me is the ability/feature unlocks as you play through it. I need to add those quest unlock features into Bug Game, perhaps even expand and add more.
Finally, I need to work on the landscape a lot more. As it stands, I’ve got a really good foundation there, but there are things like cliff erosion and river formations that just don’t sit right. Maybe I can use this as an excuse to speak to Tristan Gooley, one of my favourite authors, and a natural navigator.
| 27/01/2026 | Added animate in and out to: CraftingUI, InventoryUI, BugJournalUI, QuestUI |
| 28/01/2026 | Added toonshader to cliffs |
| built new bridge and added shaders | |
| built new cave | |
| built lanterns | |
| added gem formation to cave | |
| 30/01/2026 | Built new birch tree |
| Built bush/treecanopy shader (took forever) | |
| Built new oak tree | |
| Added canopy noise system | |
| added new bushes | |
| Startd to rebuild map to be more realistic | |
| 31/01/2026 | changed bughotel speechbubbles to screen-space anchored UIs |
| Fixed a load of hierarchy problems | |
| fixed an inconsistency problem on different screens | |
| added slow down speed function to bushes | |
| Built Bug Speech System and solidified feature unlock process | |
| BugSpeechBank.cs speech lines split into tiers | |
| BugSpeechManager.cs pools bubbles, picks lines, spawns UI bubbles | |
| BugSpeechEmitter.cs sits on each bug prefab, rolls “should speak?” | |
| FloatingSpeechBubble.cs follows an anchor; handles projection + lifetime | |
| FeatureIds.cs constants for unlock IDs | |
| FeatureUnlocks.cs helper that checks saved unlock strings | |
| Added 4 tiers of speech, unlockable through quests: simple, basic, sentences, complex | |
| updated floatingspeechbubble.cs to follow the rule that speech shows for 5 seconds + 1 second per 4 words | |
| Set up Bug Speech Category Map | |
| BugSpeechEmitter now calls on buginfo file to figure out category, then plays from relevant bank | |
| changed treeinteractable to throw out gameobjects from a pool (acorns) | |
| Changed URP_Renderer to Forward+ to stop lights flickering | |
| added redorange ball to lamposts |