Welcome to the Bug Bank!

Welcome to our page for our Portland Indie Game Squad Summer Slow Jam (Idle) entry! 

As someone who is intimately familiar with the way an interesting game idea can fizzle out, I wanted to waste spend the first few days on this project going through the brainstorming process, writing a full design doc, and drafting roadmap.  This all involved quite a great deal of restraint since I would typically have a few dozen commits at this point, but I wanted to use the time afforded by the length of this jam to improve my project management skills.  I hope that having a clear plan will help me deliver this project a bit more reliably (or at all).  To structure our planning, we're using the pie chart provided in this PIG Squad document:

Brainstorming

For the first two days, we spent our time coming up with ideas to fit the theme (and going no further).  Here are the notes for the idea we ended up going with:

This was not the idea we were most excited by, but it was reasonably interesting and we felt that it was one of the most approachable since it's our first time working with each other, and our first time participating in a game jam.

Design Doc

For the next two days, we wrote up a design doc to flesh out the sparse description from brainstorming.  The full document is only five pages long, including plenty of bulleted lists and "illustrations" built with google doc tables.

The design expanded to encompass bug types other than just bees, and money was removed -- instead opting to use a barter system where resources extracted from different bugs are used in trades rather than currency.   In order to try to give some more character to each bug, we came up with a system where the player can dig and build in a square grid however they like, and each species has unique geometric rules for its habitat.

Bees provide honey, and require a path to the exit for workers to gather pollen

Roller beetles produce pearls, and need a cyclic path to roll them out

We also drafted out a simple breeding system involving the stats of the parents, and placeable flora and decorations that boost the paths they're connected to.  Since this jam also involves a mutation theme, we made it so that new bugs species are only obtainable by mix & matching other species, although we haven't decided which bugs lead to which.

Finally, we decided on a 3D art style.  While a 2D pixel art style may feel more natural for this type of game, the skills of our team lean towards 3D and Unity.