Today is the day I speak about... Bug Toucher. Sorry I'm a few minutes late here, life sucks. Bug Toucher is the coolest game I've made so enjoy some wacky infos.
Origins
Bug Toucher willed itself into existence on New Year's 2022. Me and my friends were playing Pico VS Peter The Ant on Newgrounds, and we were losing ourselves at the silliness of it all.
This got me thinking though, what if there was a game where instead of killing a bug, you just touched it gently? I started doodling and bouncing ideas between me and my friends and we came up with most of the game that evening. You use the mouse to touch a bug from a side-scrolling perspective, gaining points for each touch before time runs out. There was going to be many levels with different bugs.
Development
A few weeks into January I had a prototype running. A few things changed during development because they didn't quite work out as I thought they would. I decided the first bug would be a beetle. If you squash it, it will flip over, leaving it vulnerable to die. This works well because it punishes you for not touching gently enough by wasting time instead of ending the whole game.
I kept working on the game through February as a school project, and made a lot of progress. The beetle now had a little state machine and more interesting movement. If your finger is in front of it, it'll turn around. If you approach it from behind, or release it after touching it, it will run away. The bug also moves more erratically, making the game much more interesting and challenging.
I was happy with all this progress but I hit a wall trying to create the other bugs. I put a lot of work into planning the game out but I was never happy with my ideas from a gameplay standpoint and I was having trouble implementing them due to lack of experience. I soon moved onto Stimbu 2 and left Bug Toucher unfinished...
Rebirth
It's now 2023. Around March I began learning the Godot engine and getting ready to leave my Game Maker projects behind. I booted up Bug Toucher and, hey, I was having a lot of fun. I realized the gameplay of the beetle was fun enough on its own, and if I put on some polish and tweaked the difficulty I could have a great game.
Most of my original code is left intact in the final and it was a real pain trying to figure out how that terrible code worked to add new stuff. On top of that, in Game Maker making a simple button is kind of a grueling task so all of the programming side was pretty tedious.
Once the game was done, I realized I accidentally left in two debug keys from earlier development. Pressing tab shows the bug's hurtbox, and backspace goes to the next level. I was amused I forgot about them so I never patched them out. Have fun with that.
The pixel art was satisfying to complete but the background was a real struggle. I had this low-res watercolor look in the abandoned version, which I liked a lot. I lost the source file though so I couldn't remedy the ugly sketchy lines over top, nor could I recreate the painting style, so I scrapped it.
I had a really hard time painting anything good so I ended up working from a background I had made 4 years ago for this cartoon. I think the brush textures look really good low-res so with a lot of altering I got it to what it is now. The colors are definitely almost perfect and the texture is nice to look at without being distracting, especially because the sprites have hard black outlines.
I think the sound really ties the game together and its crazy to think the game didn't have it before. The sound effects were assembled from libraries and freesound.org, nothing too crazy. I think the wide variety of *boink* sounds when you touch the bug adds a lot. The voice lines are done by me with my terrible microphone and some audacity effects.
The music was done by my buddies OwlBag and Stuffling.
OwlBag is great with energetic video gamey type music and he did a fantastic job with the song he created. It starts with the peaceful ambience, the song starts building to something, and then before you know it the clock starts ticking and the song freaks out and abruptly ends! It fits perfectly with the 30 seconds of gameplay and enhances the experience a lot.
Stuffling has experimented a lot over the years with his music, but much like OwlBag he loves his samples. His song Boost Blasters is an absolute classic and a must listen for any human being. I needed the title theme quickly so we dug through his unfinished songs for something to use. The song is pleasant and welcoming and it works well for the title screen. It's nice that it's pretty long in case you get sick of losing and want to hang out on the title for a while. The voice clips on the "sücco presents" screen are from random old YouTube videos. He just assembled that out of nowhere and I think it's hilarious. If you can find the source of those samples, I'll give you an award!
The special song you get for beating ??? mode was a last minute addition. He made it to amuse me and I put it in as a bonus because I liked it so much. The melody is an inside joke between us that I hope to share with the world one day.
Both of these fellas are great minds and I can't wait to work with them on more music in the future (although I'll probably have to start paying them!)
Final Thoughts
I'm really proud of Bug Toucher as a game. Besides the polished presentation, I think the gameplay is very compelling despite being so unconventional. I think it relies a bit too much on precision and randomness, but it's still enjoyable and hard to put down until it's beaten. The quotas to beat each mode are pretty high, so you really have to master the game to see it through to the end.
The high difficulty put a lot of people off, but everyone who stuck through it came out really satisfied and happy, judging from a lot of the warm reviews I got. I don't know if every game I make will require such a strong will to beat, but I think a tough but achievable challenge is one of the most satisfying things out there. Once I'm more comfortable making games, I'd love to take this gameplay style to new heights.
I only got about 750 plays on Newgrounds, but a lot of support still. I'm very happy that my silly game touched a lot of people. The game was also reposted on a site called y8 and got over 10,000 plays on there! Crazy! I hope it was the hippest thing in some 4th grade class for a few days.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a fan. Now I gotta get some darn sleep.
P.S. Here are those old builds I showed off above (Windows only)
🐒See you next post!🐒
