A Bug's (Dead) Life - iOS Game Dev

This past term, I've been working with my group on this game called "A Bug's (Dead) Life". It's a simple squashing game on iOS built with cocos2dx using xcode.

A Bug's (Dead) Life

Above is our title screen. The bear in the middle is cycling through a walk animation. Settings brings you to the Options menu, which has mute functions. Clicking "Start Game" brings you to the next screen.

Initial ideas for our game were a sorting game, a path redirection game, and a puzzle game. We decided to go with a bug-squisher game to highlight the enemy animations.

The game screen.

Above, I placed all of the animated game assets unto the scene at once to test animations and scale. As you can see, the spider and fly graphics are rotated the wrong way (they need to be facing left). This caused some problems later on with enemy movement.

Enemies consist of dragonflies, bees, flies, and spiders. We also have butterflies to act as "friendlies". The objective of the game is to squash as many bugs as you can without killing too many friendlies.

Enemy movement is based on it's rotation and moves forward at all times depending on it's bearing. A function is then called to rotate the enemy in a random direction. Enemies that exit one side of the screen are teleported to the other side.

It's a party!

I also added movement to the bear. Just another factor to mess with the player. It rotates and moves similarly to the bugs, but gives no points.

After playing the game a bit, it was actually pretty fun. With all of the parts animated and moving around on their own, there was something about the movement of the bugs that made the game very mesmerizing...

Just a view of the iMac I worked on.

Not to mention the background music and sound effects. We borrowed some bgm from Kingdom Hearts and used generic splat and squish sounds we found online. Everything together was great and it turned out to be an awesome game in the end.

A heartfelt thanks to my groupmates Brennan and Luis, we did great!