Game-in-a-month day 14 – Roach Roundup

I’m now two weeks into my game-in-a-month project, and I think things are coming together better than I expected. I currently have a fully functional roach scaring simulator to play with, now all it needs is sounds, a menu system, the objectives coded in and some more polish (more furniture types, maybe a throw rug, pictures on the wall, etc). So I think I’m still good for a release on the 19th. Although, seeing as Halloween is coming up, I might just take a few more days to polish it up a little bit more and release it on the 30th for your creepy pleasure, seeing as the theme (haunted, dark mansion; ghosts messing with lights) just fits the season so well.

But I digress, on to the screenshots and new features!

As I mentioned, the code for the roaches it pretty much complete. The AI to make them move around was a lot of fun to implement, as I don’t normally think in terms of a bug’s brain when I’m pondering AI type problems. My first attempt didn’t turn out so well. The bugs seemed extremely unnatural as they would simply keep moving forward if no lights were on to influence them. After I bit of musing, I realized that what the needed was skitter, a little bit of randomness to their movement. So I made them start and stop erratically in small spurts, occasionally changing direction slightly, and even turning around completely sometimes, as if they were thoroughly inspecting the floorboards. Which they would be in real life, roaches gotta eat too! And it made a huge difference, they are almost mesmerizing to watch now, just sort of wandering about like that, forming all kind of strange patterns and just generally coming across as very roach-y.

The random wandering is only the first part of the AI algorithm, though, as turning a light (or lights) on really changes things up. Cockroaches don’t light lights, and my roaches will run from a light like a dog from a bathtub: in a straight line just as fast as their little legs will carry them. And being fairly mindless creatures, they go back to whatever they were doing before the moment the lights go off. It’s kinda funny to watch. Turn light on, watch roaches scatter, turn light off, light on, light off.

I plan on starting to add the sound effects to go with these motions this week, and I’m really starting to realize that the heart of the gameplay with this project, the bit that is “fun”, is playing God with the roaches and alternatively scaring them silly and then letting them wander. So I really want the sound design to augment that. Wandering roaches that aren’t actively being harassed by a light bulb should make little “do de do” sounds and generally just come across as having the IQ of a rock with a rubber-band motor attached to it with scotch tape. And when the lights come on, some Katamari Damacy style screams, pitched about three octaves too high, would be just about perfect. Add in a few Monty Python-esque “Run Away! Run Away!”‘s and I hope I’ll have a recipe that will delight your inner seven-year old for hours.