do you mind bugs

Project Role

Game Designer / Level Designer / 2D Pixel Artist / Sound Design

Game Description

do you mind bugs is a 2D top-down dungeon crawler where the player must navigate a dungeon-like collection of interconnected apartment rooms. The player character's emotional state modifies their abilities, which you can change by picking up corresponding emotion bugs.

Design Goals

I set out to create a game that explored a weirder, more arthouse take on the conventional Zelda-like action-adventure dungeon crawler foundation, while also adding a gameplay twist that differentiates the game from its contemporaries. I thought it would be pretty cool if the player character's emotional state modified their abilities, so the team and I set out to come up with interesting  variations for each ability that thematically fit each of the emotions and could be applied to different combat and puzzle scenarios in each dungeon room.

Mechanic Design

During the ideation phase, the concepts that I and the team came up with for the emotion abilities were much more complex and ambitious. However, with only a few weeks to develop the game and working within the strict event limit of Construct 3, we worked on simplifying the concepts. Our approach to this involved the happy, sad, and angry emotion abilities being better versions of the base neutral emotion ability, dealing more damage and providing some kind of simple but unique additional perk. For example, the neutral paintbrush ability is a basic slash attack, but the sad paintbrush ability also creates a bubble shield around the player that protects them until the shield takes damage. We kept the puzzle applications simple too, giving each emotion an obstacle they can interact with to clear.

We focused on giving each of the emotion abilities applications to both combat and puzzle/exploration: our game's two biggest focuses. For example, the happy paintbrush ability is not only used to paint the happy canvases to open blocked paths, it also serves as a slash attack with more range and more damage compared to the neutral paintbrush ability. 

We ran into an interesting design problem where we needed to ensure that the player couldn't softlock themselves from continuing just because they had the wrong emotion to open the way forward and collected all the currently available emotion bugs in the wrong order, resulting in a situation where they could not change their emotion to the correct one. At first we tried coming up with alternate ways the emotion bugs could work to prevent this problem, like having them consistently respawn in certain locations. However, the linear progression of the game took care of this issue, since there would only be one order to collect the emotion bugs in.

Level Design

I went with a pretty linear approach for the game's level design, having an intended main path and order that mechanics are introduced that players would follow while progressing in the game. To encourage exploration and help the map feel interconnected, the main path isn't always immediately obvious and there are paths that the player will need to return to later after they obtain the correct emotion ability in another room (or series of rooms). I also added optional paths that contain secret collectibles, rewarding the player for exploring off the main path with the right emotion ability.

Since the emotion bugs function kind of like keys that also alter your abilities, I would often design the rooms around a challenge of needing to navigate around objects/obstacles in the room while dealing with enemies in the player's current emotional state in order to reach the emotion bug they need in order to progress.

I structured the final chase sequence of the game as a linear hallway-like gauntlet of quick puzzle and combat challenges in order to serve as a final culminating test for everything the player has learned up until this point, with the looming threat of a monstrous bug chasing behind them creating an intimidating, memorable set piece to end the game with and an additional pressure to complete the challenges as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Final Thoughts

I'm really proud of how this project came out. It was my first experience developing a game with other people and I got a lot out of managing a project like that for the first time and discussing my ideas with my team members. The simplifications we made ended up being for the best because I feel like the emotion system we created came together in a really intuitive and unique way that fit the surreal, arthouse theme we were going for. We managed to give most of the emotion abilities both combat and puzzle applications like we planned, but we ended up having to cut the puzzle applications we had planned for the happy and angry food projectile abilities in order to keep the game in scope and under Construct 3's event limit. That's the one thing I would want to revisit and expand upon in the hypothetical situation where we had more development time and events to work with in Construct 3.