Hymenoptera King

(I didn't have time to do any balancing so let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments)

Hymenoptera King

You’re an ant living on a small ball of dirt suspended by a spiderweb. The spider is moving in for a meal while your village is being attacked by hornets.

Death is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to happen now. Delay the inevitable by fending off hornets and keeping the spider at bay!

How to play:

On top of the map is a giant (beige?) box, this is the "spider" if it reaches the end of the web, you lose. To prevent the spider from reaching the end, hit it with a hornet to reset it. It's speed will increase after every reset so only do it when necessary

The area is filled with hornets, with more spawning in from a nearby nest. Whenever a hornet lands on the ground, weight is increased. If weight reaches 5, you lose. To prevent this, kill hornets then pick up their corpse and throw them over the edge. ALSO the little ant corpses on the ground add weight, so pick them up and throw them off the edge whenever you see one.

You can only kill hornets while mounted on a hornet. To mount a hornet, jump on it and complete the minigame. You can kill other hornets by attacking, BUT hornet corpses add weight, so don't kill too many at once. You can kill the hornet you're on by launching it into the ground (or the spider) with F.

Controls:

• WASD - move
• leftShift - sprint
• space - Jump
• F - launch hornet (when riding)
• Right click - pick up corpse
• Left click - throw corpse
• middle mouse- disembark from a hornet without killing it
• P - Reset game (in case of emergency)
• Mini Game - press left or right click when prompted

Development notes:

This game was very complicated to make in such a short amount of time. The hornet Ai is an fsm and it got pretty complicated the more features I added. As a result I had to simplify the design which ended up being crucial to actually finishing it in time because I just barely made the submission deadline this time.

The original idea would have other ants running around the village. The hornets would track down villagers or the player and attack them. Your goal would have been the same, fending off the spider and the hornets but you also had to keep the villagers alive while dodging hornets. Your score would have been the sum of the time alive of each villager. I wanted the player to have to sneak up on a hornet from behind to be able to mount it, but the broken (till the very end) hornet AI made it very difficult to add that feature.

I’m happy with the final result (after bug fixes) but I regret not having more time for the graphics. I went for the psx-style look because of how quick and easy it is to make assets, but I still didn’t have time to make some props for the world, or even a simple spider/hornets nest model.

Known issues:

• Falling at high speeds causes you to clip through the ground. This will likely happen when you fly up to the spider and launch your hornet. Luckily a way around this is to just fly into the spider to reset it without launching your hornet
• Sometimes the player doesn’t move when idling. Easy fix is to just jump but if you move horizontally I think that works too
• You can sometimes ‘mount’ a corpse like a living hornet. Luckily this doesn’t seem to have any negative consequences, just press middle mouse to unmount or F to launch the corpse. press right click further away from the corpse to prevent this.
• Game is probably unbalanced leaning towards way too easy. The spider might be too slow, and the hornet spawner too far. idk, need playtesting
• Attacking from a hornet has a weird hit box. The hornet you’re attacking needs to be like right in front of you for best results
• Camera sensitivity might be too high on the web version and the character walk too slow.

Post-Jam bug fixes

I spent a good amount of time smashing bugs to make the game more playable, below are a list of changes from the original version:

• Fixed Hornets unexpected intelligence and self-preservation by refusing to land at all after one of their own gets killed
• Fixed Hornets getting stuck in the ground after getting too close (but not close enough to land)
• Fixed a few Hornet related animation issues, like a dead hornet playing a flying animation, or a flying hornet playing a landing animation.
• Fixed score counter to properly count hornets that land
• Fixed Spider ending not registering
• Fixed Hornet spawner not doing its job and added sphere to show where it is
• triggered gameover condition in case player clips through ground
• Added a reset button in case anything unexpected locks you up (press P)
• Added sprint button in case the player moves too slow in the web version, also changed the throwing vector so you don’t have to walk so far to throw a hornet off the edge

Everything except music made from scratch for Ludum Dare 50 by me @Skleembof

Music by Kevin "The Legend" Macleod:

Journey To Ascend by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/8951-journey-to-ascend

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license