Hello! I’m Arda and this is my developer journal for my George Brown Game Design solo thesis project, BugByte! I am the sole programmer, artist, and game designer for the project. I wanted to document the creation of this project as part of my submission, but also because I think it'll just be nice to look back on once everything's all over!

The reason I chose to work alone for my capstone project is so I could get a taste of what it’s like, to get a sense of if I can handle it, and to see how far I can push myself in learning a completely new piece of software with the fundamental computer science that I learned in my time during my undergraduate degree. It did seem daunting at first, but I find that I personally learn best when I throw myself into unfamiliar territory and have to learn on the fly.

Goals

I wanted to get to a point where I felt comfortable participating in game jams, and to a point where I felt like I could learn enough about Unity & get enough “tools in my toolbelt” that I could make a start-to-finish experience within the usual 3 allotted days that game jams tend to operate on. What I didn’t want was to enter a game jam and spend a majority of the time looking up tutorials and trying to answer basic Unity questions like “how do I make a 2D tilemap” or “what are ScriptableObjects useful for”, “What is a shader”, things like that. I want to learn solid game programming, and honestly to brush up on what I learned in university... I'm a little rusty.

Okay, so what is BugByte?

BugByte is an amalgamation of a lot of my favorite games and favorite elements in games. If I had to describe it at a high level,

“BugByte is a 2D top-down roguelite dungeon crawler creature-catcher that aims to recreate the Pokemon Nuzlocke experience, combining elements from games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate, and Into The Breach in order to deliver a strategic, tense, yet simple semi-turn-based dungeon-crawling experience.“

It combines the creature catching elements from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, with the combat and enemy patterns of Crypt of the Necrodancer and Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate, along with the strategic positioning and environmental interaction elements of Into The Breach. The game will also use random dungeon generating. So, the overarching loop and goal of the game is to explore the floor, find the boss & defeat it, then progress to the next floor - rinse, repeat. Your typical roguelike loop.

The game will be semi-turn-based in that everyone moves on a grid, and so every time you, the player, do certain actions, it will “end your turn”, meaning that the enemies will all do something after you do something. Certain actions, like moving a square or performing an attack, will end your turn, whereas maybe using an item will not.

One of the central pillars of the game is that I want you to have an evolving party, so you’ll have to catch a bunch of creatures and build up an arsenal of diverse creatures with diverse movesets – the catch is that once a creature dies, it’s gone for good. So the player will want to play much more carefully and think further ahead about what they’re going to do to keep their adorable little creatures alive as long as they can. One of the central gimmicks of the game, capturing creatures, revolves around the player taking advantage of enemy patterns and behaviour. The player can place a “capture net” and either place it predictively, taking the enemy’s behaviour into account so that they step onto it themselves, or if they have a creature with certain attacks that push other creatures around, take advantage of those properties and “bump” creatures into the net to capture them. If you’ve ever played Pokemon and have done one of those ice puzzles, where your character slides around, it’s kind of reminiscent of that – you can bump creatures all the way until they hit an obstacle, and if they happen to collide with a net during that slide, then you successfully add them to your party.

The roguelike aspect of the game is that the creatures you encounter will be random, and every few times you level up a creature you are presented with 3 random moves that that creature can learn, and you can choose to add one to its moveset. Moves will vary in rarity, and rarity will correspond to how powerful the attack is – whether it’s really energy (the mana in the game) efficient, or how long of a cast time (the number of turns it takes for the move to actually come out once used) or cooldown (the number of turns it takes for the move to become useable again) it has, how much damage it does, so on and so forth.

I know, it sounds a little ambitious for a first-time solo project, but I think a game like this will be able to help me learn about all kinds of different systems which should (hopefully) push my limits and get me out of my comfort zone frequently, while still being able to exercise my computer science knowledge. Will I come to regret this? Will this game suffer from scope creep? Probably yes… To both. But, there’s no better place to learn than in a learning environment, so with that mind, here we go!