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This, and the upcoming posts, will concern parts of the process of making a shoot ‘em up game together with the other members of group Mimic.
In our game Beelonging the player takes on the role of a bee that’s part of a swarm. The controllable bee is located in front of the others and its movement is executed by using the mouse. The bee follows wherever the pointer is located. Initially we did not have an indication of where the pointer was because it would be told by the bee’s location. This gave the game a cleaner look and were to help with the immersion, not having the normal, rather displeasing, mouse pointer on top of the protagonist. This decision made a problem submerge though.
In the game the swarm on the left of the screen mainly serves as the number of lives that the player has left. When the main bee is hit, it is replaced by one of the bees in the swarm. The act out of it is that the playable bee falls of the screen and one of the available bees leaves its position and follows the cursor. The problem that occurred was when the player was hit while being further to the right of the screen. The replacing bee would set of towards the cursor, possibly running into enemies on the way and the player would not have a clear idea of where it would stop. This was not an issue when the switch to a new bee happened closer to the swarm because the fill in bee’s way to the desired position was quick enough that it would not matter.
After the problem was addressed the programmer of our group was assigned to implement the solution that was decided upon. To solve this, we added an opaque grey dot that acts as the pointer. This makes it possible to keep track of the position at all times. The dot is way less distracting than a standard cursor and when the main bee is in the same position its presence is barely noticeable.
About Maximilian Kassander
2017 Game Design
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