Welcome to Magic Marty’s!
Magical flowers attract dimensional butterflies that you can capture and sell. Beware though! These plants will also attract dangerous beetles... How much money can you make before the beetles destroy all the flowers?
An Epic MegaJam 2022 Game
Working with some coworkers we threw together Butterflies and Beetles, a game for the Epic MegaJam in 2022. In this VR game the player finds themselves in the shoes of a “worker” at Magic Marty’s where they collect magical butterflies. Unfortunately the plants that attract the butterflies are vulnerable to pesky beetles that burrow their way up through the ground and eat the plants from below! The players balance catching the butterflies as they flit around above ground with squashing the infestation of beetles rising up from below all the while trying to pass off the caught butterflies in between to make a tasty profit. Profit for Magic Marty of course.
My Contributions
Given the short amount of time we had to put the game together my teammates and I decided to make some choices early on to help make things easier on us. We made use of a plugin that provided the majority of common VR controls like hand physics and teleport/walking movement. We also agreed to keep the majority of our implementation in Blueprints to help keep things moving quickly without the need for rebuilds.
With those decisions out of the way we delegated out the work. I was in charge of a few pieces:
the interaction between and management of the Butterflies, Beetles, and Plants
the pathfinding of the Beetles
and the design and implementation of the tutorial.
The interaction between the Butterflies, Beetles, and Plants was as follows: The number and health of the Plants would determine how many Butterflies could exist at a given time and how quickly they would spawn. The Beetles would spawn in waves at slightly random intervals and would attack the roots of the Plants, damaging them. If a Plant’s roots were completely damaged, the Plant would permanently die and cease attracting Butterflies. This system essentially had 2 managers: one that kept track of the health of the Plants, the number of Butterflies, and the spawning of them at intervals; and another that timed when to spawn the Beetles and provided them a reference to a Plant for pathfinding purposes.
The pathfinding of the Beetles was, to put it bluntly, rudimentary. I didn't have time to develop a fleshed out wall climbing system, so the behavior of Beetles from spawning to attacking a Plant was very static. Once the Beetles spawned and crawled out of the floor in the basement, they would scuttle over to the closest wall, up that wall to the ceiling, and then along the ceiling to a Plant whose reference was given to them upon being spawned by the Beetle management system. Like I said, rudimentary.
Finally, and what took up the biggest chunk of my time, was the tutorial. The tutorial was voiced by our artist and walked the player through all the parts of the game. Instructing them on movement, catching Butterflies, crushing Beetles, and selling captured Butterflies to the needy customers just outside. The final product of the tutorial ended up taking around 3-5 minutes depending on how quickly the player played through it.
There were various other small features that I got to touch on, for example sound effects, ambient sound, and the score tracker. We were able to get a fairly performant version done by the time the jam wrapped up. Overall it was a very fun project and my first time getting to build a game primarily for VR!
