Buzz Off!'s Original 10-Hour Development

Buzz Off! Development.

10 Hours - Oh boy...

Buzz Off! was originally made as a one-off in a series of game jams that I would participate in every week.  Due to my schedule, and the expected times of the jams, each entry only had roughly 10 hours of time to develop, from start to finish.  Buzz Off! was later in the series of jams, so I had already created a template project to use as a base.  This included incredibly basic menus, AI, and architecture, ultimately saving me around 3 hours of would-be development time.  All said, the theme this time was "Bees" and I hadn't a clue what to do... especially considering the fact I couldn't whitebox this theme, and art takes time!

Bees... What about a beekeeper?

Throughout the week, I ideated.  The obvious came to mind; shm'ups, pollen collectors, kill the bees, run away from the bees... and then the idea of a beekeeper trying to collect from hives came up.  I realized that this was something that I could definitely do in the time I had left.  I thought having 4 hives, one in each cardinal direction, and bees that would spawn from the hives as you collected from them to chase you, could be an interesting idea.

I found the fun earlier than expected...

So I got to building the game, filling in the blanks on the template I had created in Unity, and working to actually implement player movement, a hive, and a bee.  Nothing had art yet, this was all taking place with white and red circles and squares in a black void, but things were coming along surprisignly smoothly.  The hive took a minute to actually get to be properly responsive to both collision and a trigger surrounding it, but I was able to quickly fix that by reorganizing the hierarchy so that the trigger was a layer down.  Had to set the player to always awake to make sure things were responsive in the trigger as well.  This was my first time using Unity for 2D top-down, so I had to figure out collision properly as well.  As for the bee, I just gave it some incredibly simple follow the player AI... at which point it hit me.  Luring the bee away to test the hive was fun.  So, I pivoted...

What's fun is fun, this was the game now... now for art.

This was the game now.  At this point, I was probably around the 5-hour mark and I still had to get the art in, learn how to get animations working, and do some basic programming for the grassy floor (did you know it's different every time?).  I figured it would be faster to find art online somewhere, but it turns out bees are hard to find... go figure.  Getting humans right takes me a lot of time too, so I sought to find the closest thing I could get to liking on kenney.nl.  What I found was something meant for top-down map systems.  This would remain apparent based on the outline around the character in the first version of Buzz Off! but it had to do for now.  I also took 2 grass tiles to randomly generate a floor with.  After that, I spent the next 20 minutes attempting to style match the best I could with the time for a sprite for the collected honey, as well as a sprite for the timer.  Originally I was trying to do a stopwatch, but it just wasn't coming out right so I did an hourglass instead.  The art for the beehive went by surprisingly quickly, and I even made a second version, seen on the title screen.  The bees... I wasn't sure how I wanted to do them at first.  I was thinking a swarm of pixels that animate around, but realized that could have some animation problems pop up with either frame-counts and looping not being reasonable, or each 'bee' being trackable by the eye (moving in circles and such) and thus look awkward moving towards the player they way they do.  I opted to go for one big circle with stripes and wings, it was the queen herself chasing the player now.  I gave it two frames of animation, thinking it would be fine enough for the idea.  I still had to get sounds in...

Bzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sounds were relatively easy.  My template had the foundations for the programming already ready for it, I just had to procure them.  I opted for finding them on opengameart.  I wanted a buzzing loop, a collection sound, a timer ding, a menu click, and a death sound of some sort.  The first 4 of those sounds were easy to find something for that would work well.  The collection sound had me skeptical at first as the only thing I could find wasn't loopable, but when it was put into the game, I realized it gave the player an auditory tracker specifically because of that (which is important due to the time limit and action-game nature of the game.  Players can't necessarily glance at the bottom left with a bee close to them), so it worked out.  For the death sound, I opted to cut the screen to the death screen immediately and have a scream play.  A bee doesn't kill you in real life, that would be silly.  I found an edited version of a free wilhelm scream.  Good stuff.

Extra time means extra polish, finishing up

At this point I had an hour or two of extra time.  I had gotten done debugging and minor problems, and balancing the game, but there was still a bit left I could do.  This is when I added the art to the title screen and spent a much longer time than anticipated changing the colors of the UI to have a color scheme based off the beehives I created before.  It took so much longer than anticipated manually replacing those that by the end, I only had around 20 minutes or so left, so I built the game and uploaded the first version here.  I updated the credits and wrote a short description of the game, as well as procured screenshots.  I would later discover that the bee animation was broken, and wouldn't work, but given I had already submitted, I would end up attending to that later in an update.