Role:
Game designer
Worked mostly on
dynamic level design,
controls,
and health system.
Team:
3D Artist: Michel Cougnaud
2D Artist: Danton Slip
Sound designer: Orelien Demey
Project Manager: Mathieu Cibat
UX/UI Designer: Sara Jaafar
Programmer:
Thomas Giro, François Candela
Game Designers :
Malo Dalmier & Jonas Dutouquet
A Shoot'em up :
- Shooter controlled with a mouse.
- Dynamic difficulty !
- Hacking ships refills your health also makes the game harder.
The hack mechanic:
In B.U.G., you're a virus that can take control of various ships. To do that, you'll have to fill a hack bar by destroying enemies. When fully charged, you can trigger the hack, aim at a ship and control a new ship with new weapons.
The problem we first had with this mechanic was that player could get confused about where they were on screen after they hacked a ship, that's why we decided to focus on a mouse control: that way,player mostly want to know where their mouse-pointer is: when they hack, they aim with the pointer and they already know they're pointing at the ship they selected, ready to play.
Combo & health system:
The game's intention was to both use positive and negative feedbacks loops to create dynamic difficulty, so that being good would mean having to deal with expert difficulty, while players who have trouble beating the enemies can follow their own progression path. I was in charge of this progression system: designing the enemies pattern and the evolving level design.
The idea is that the game's difficulty is progressing alongside the hack mechanic: when you hack an enemy, it will charge your combo: more points but harder enemies. To kill those enemies in an easier way, hack them to get their power. But as you hack them, you're progressing toward another combo: more difficult enemies.
We still wanted to encourage the hack a lot: hacking enemies will not only increase your combo score, but will also refill your health, since it's a brand new ship. As you play, you'll get domaged and will have to change ship. It's up to you if you want to use your hack bar as soon as you get it to get as much score as possible, or if you want to slow down the difficulty curve and hack when your health is low.
When the player runs out of health, we didn't want them to start the whole level again, because of our accessibility intentions. We designed the game so that the player does not die when their ship is destroyed. Instead, it goes back to its "virus state", in control of no ship. The challenge here is to avoid bullets, waiting for the hack bar to be charged again, with a basic combo.
That way, everyone can finish the level and game, even if they're still figuring out how the game work.
Level Design
The level Design was really interesting to create, as it was directly linked to the adaptative difficulty of the game. The enemy waves will change depending on how good the player is doing.
I tried out different patterns in our engine's tool, always keeping in mind that the patterns should always be good enough so that's it's cool for the player to hack the ship and get their weapon and fire rate, without it being too hard for the player not to be killed by.
Quickly, I etablished some rules on how each ship should be place in a wave of enemies, depending on how difficult I want the wave to be. Then I would order each wave chronogically inside a timeline that makes the waves spawn one after the other.
Because of this, lots of ships you take control of are shooting in waves of 3 shoots and then recharge, to let the player avoid the bullets.
Enemies that shoots without pause would often be place with a rotation to give the player a chance to kill them or hack them before they would be a real threat.
There's several timelines with specific waves and difficulty, depending on the combo the player currently has. When the player hacks ships and get to bigger combos, the system switch the timeline and spawn the appropriate enemies, with the right difficulty.