Bubble Bumble Project Breakdown

Game Development Summary: Play as a bumblebee named Kiwi, a small but mighty bee with a broken stinger as she collects flowers on her way home while avoiding the Aviator Birds in planes trying to shoot her down.
Responsabilities: Solo artist, animator, programmer
Game Type: 2D pixel art side-scroller, endless runner (flyer)
Engine: Unity
Code Language: C# / Visual Studio
Builds: Web/Itch io, macOS, windows

To make my first indie game, I learned Unity and C#. I decided to make a one-level game.  that included the basics of a game; the main character, animation, menus, health, points, enemies, music, and cutscenes.

I had a little computer programming experience (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), so getting familiar with C# wasn't too difficult.

I ended up having two levels total, and two animated cutscenes, and here's my process!

I always start with a paper sketch to feel myself bringing the characters and story to life. Starting with simple circles, I added details to them until they looked like something I could work with.

From researching games during May 2021, I knew that I needed to keep my first game manageable. I wanted to keep it cute and simple, so I went with my first initial concept sketch.

I came up with a small, cute, and charming bee that I named Kiwi. Named after someone who thought the pollen bag she carried was a kiwi fruit, which I thought was cute in itself.

But, I also sketched a realistic bee to understand how to design my cartoon-y main character from its real life counterpart.

I've been using Adobe Illustrator for years, and I really liked how this first concept turned out. But I wanted to push myself to learn more new skills. After I got a well-rounded idea of how my game would look, I started learning pixel art.

I was trying to replicate my adobe illustration concept 1:1, but at the time, I didn't fully understand that less is more when it comes to pixel art. This bee and flower design was quickly scrapped for being too bulky, over-complicated, and not very pleasing to look at.

Eventually, I made my main character smaller; at around 16 pixels. With pixel art, it’s more efficient and easier to create and animate a smaller character, especially as a beginner. Now that Kiwi’s final design is done, I can start applying animation.

I had an overall idea of how the story would go and how I would use narrative design to guide the player through the game.

Kiwi, the smallest bee in her hive and with a broken stinger, was collecting pollen on a sunny day with some of her worker bee friends. Then, she was going to get trapped in a bubble that a child left behind in a field of flowers. As the other bees accidentally leave Kiwi behind, she has to make her way through the flowers and into the sky to find her way home while collecting flowers, and avoiding the aviator birds trying to shoot her down.

The silly part that made this make sense in the game was that since Kiwi has a broken stinger, it was too dull for her to burst out of the “Super Bubble 3000” bubble solution. So,  she had no choice but to go home to get freed from the bubble.  

I had planned for each level to have enemies that reflect its environment as the player travels in the game. Crabs on surfboards at the beach, frogs on lilypad carts at the pond, ants using crumbs as balancing balls in the dirt, and a few more ideas.

When you finally get Kiwi back to her hive, you would interact with some of the other bees and celebrate, deliver your pollen, and have a chat with the queen bee.

Of course, this scope was too big for me to manage for my first game, but I’m glad I thought my story points through. Since I didn’t know which parts of my story develop that I would keep or leave behind, I wanted to have a lot of options to choose from.

Even knowing that I didn’t have the time or experience to plan out a multi-level and full story game, I still took the time to sketch out and write down ideas for possible scenes and quests. There was a lot.

The main two playable game scenes were the main character starting the story in a field of flowers and then flying into the sky to go home. I really liked this route but changed my scope to ease the stress as a first time developer.

I needed up only keeping the sky scene. But, I still enjoyed drawing all these clouds!

I’ve done animation and motion graphics in the past, but I made sure to research the rules of animation and how those same rules applied to pixel art.

I was aiming for at least three to four animations for all of my animated elements, but I ended up keeping it at one or two to keep the scope of my project manageable.

I love it when games have smaller animations that add life to the game.

The main character’s health profile icon will blink her eyes and wiggle her antennas every 15 seconds. Durning play testing, people enjoyed pointing it out. I knew that putting a little more time into that animation was a good choice to further the player’s game experience.

Birds eat bugs and can fly, so they were a natural choice to be a source of conflict in my game. I call them the Aviator Birds! Birds flying in planes; creatures that already have the gift of flight were funny as a character design element.

I originally planned to have three different types of birds and Ai attacks; yellow planes with a single seed attack, red planes with a two-seed attack, and blue planes with a  three-seed blast. I only kept one of the birds and attack styles.

I wasn’t able to figure out how to program the seeds being shot out of the planes. I needed up having a box collider on the birds which would damage the player on collision.

I kept my points system simple; collect the flowers. I designed some power-ups; honeycombs falling from the sky that was left as help aids by the other bees, but that was out of my main scope and timeline.

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I also design a guide for the player in the form of a friendly butterfly that didn't make it past the concept stage.

I kept my menu designs fairly simple. The “play!" button takes you to the game. I was unable to program a save and load system, so the game restarts every time you click play.
 

Clicking "levels" shows you all of the current levels, the “about" button takes you to a text page about the developer, and the “quit" button immediately quits the game.

Next time I’ll add a “are you sure?” prompt to insure that player’s decision about quitting.

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I also added an animation of Kiwi shouting "get me outta this bubble!" to enhance the player's first impression.

Now that the art was done, it was time to move on to the programming. This part also took me the longest time to get through, and I was programming until the last minutes of my launch time.

As mentioned earlier, I only know enough basic coding to read and understand other code languages. And that was enough to help me program my game. I made sure to find solutions to my issues based on the game I was making.

I looked up code for a repeating parallax background, player controls and movement, health, points system, enemies, music, scene management, and more.  

I don’t consider myself a programmer with a capital “P”, but I know enough to have an understanding of the medium and skill set to read documentation, find solutions, and to make it work.

Making and finishing a project is always an accomplishment. This was definitely a challenge for me since I don’t have any background or formal training in game development or design.

But, creativity is the greatest transferable skill, and all I had to do it learn some new tools and be patient with myself.