This game was showcased at the 2024 USC Games Expo and is now available on Steam! And Itch.io!

What is Bugnauts?

In short, a 3D Bullet Hell game about ecological conservation. The player spends the catching the projectiles shot by enemies and throwing them back with their bug net. When said bugs are defeated balance is restored to the island where the game takes place.

Major points of inspiration:

We went into the project with the idea of combining the whimiscal platforming of Super Mario Odyssey and the 3D combat of Nier: Automata.

What did I do?

I worked as a combat and movement designer on this game. My job included to prototyping new mechanics, writing and maintaining internal documents, and communicating with other disciplines to make our game great!

Movement Design Doc.pdf

Early Ideation

I collaborated with my fellow designers to brainstorm some movement abilities that conveyed the snappy, energetic feeling we were looking for.

After we had come up with a few that we really enjoyed I drafted corresponding documentation describing the movements for our art team to give them a basis for animating the player character

Solution: Rapid Prototyping

Some team members had a hard time visualizing some the abilities we had come up with. So in addition to the documentation I made prototypes for several of the movement abilities to further demonstrate my ideas.

To the left is the prototype for the "Air Dash" ability that lets the player dash horizontally in the air in proportion to the meter that fills when the input is held.

Projectiles

During early ideation we created multiple kinds of projectiles and I even brainstormed with different ways they could combine their with each other.

This way there was an added layer of strategy in combat that could reward players for creative thinking.

Solution: Scope Control

In the end however this proved to be too much content for the scope of our game and we had to scale back by cutting these interactions out along with one of the bullets as we continued to refine the mechanics of our game.

Solution: Projectile Plants

The players were finding themselves routinely in a situation where they needed projectiles and they couldn't get enough or the right kind from enemies.

So we came up with the projectile plants to feed the players what they need without breaking the flow of game play.

Tutorials

When it came time to begin making tutorials we knew from the outset that text alone wouldn't be enough to communicate our ideas.

So we included clips like the to the left to help us demonstrate the mechanics. This way players would know for certain what it is they're trying to do.

Solution: Multiple Pages

Our tutorials for a time suffered from the large amount of text on screen, leading to players ignoring crucial information. So I met with our usability lead and UI leads and we decided to split the tutorials into multiple pages to help the player digest the information better.

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