Games from Nothing: Post-Mortem — Bug Spotter

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The beginning of the game, as well as a good example of what happens when you let the bee get too close to you.

The process of coding Bug Spotter was both substantially easier and substantially more difficult than I had originally envisioned. After a laborious design process, I was easily able to code the proper behaviors for the spot-hungry lady bug, the bee that tailed it, and the spots that needed to be collected. I attribute the ease with that phase of the project to the fact that I very consciously designed my game to stay well within the limits of code we had already had substantial amounts of experience with throughout the semester.

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The player guides the ladybug to the various spots as it is pursued by the bee.

I experienced two major crises when coding the game; one I was able to resolve, the other I was not able to overcome. The first problem I ran into came when I attempted to change the speed of the flower’s rotation after a given event. The code I was attempting to use to express that idea ended up corrupting my game file, and I lost about two hours of work. I was able to confirm that it was that particular bit of code by duplicating a game file I knew worked, pasting the sketchy code into one of the files, saving it, deleting the code I had just added, and attempting to run the file again. Even with all traces of new code removed, the duplicate copy was permanently corrupted. After that incident, I became way more paranoid about saving working duplicates of my game, and never ran into an irreversible mistake like that again.

The one thing I was not able to get working in this game was the collision with the bee and the ladybug. I wanted to turn the center of the flower brown each time the bee collided with the player. I made the mistake of thinking that, because the collision with the black spots worked flawlessly, I would easily be able to get the collision with the bee working as well. Unfortunately, I ended up spending at least as much time working exclusively on the bee collision as I spent working on all the other elements in the game combined, and it still does not function correctly.

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The ladybug has found its spots, and returns to the now-golden center of the flower.

Overall, I feel as if this has been my most successful game yet. The concept has been really well-received by everyone I have shown it to, and it felt really great to be able to begin to use designs that were more complex than simple circles, squares, and triangles. I hope to be able to continue developing this game in the future.

Author: Amy York