Theme : Delay The Inevitable

The most obvious way to tackle the theme to me is to survive endless waves of monsters. I also wanted to avoid focusing on the inevitable thing being that the player eventually looses, as it feels weak and uninspired since any game with some kind of score would fit the theme this way.

I tried to think of something a bit unique that feels inevitable that I could base the game around. I ended up going for insects being attracted to lights and burning themself. The game would be based on drawing the insects away from the lights.

Boids

To create the mosquitoes AI, I used boids with some additionnal rules. One rule to make them be attracted by the player, and another to make them attracted by lights. They also have 2 sets of weights for each rule, one for when the player is close and one when the player is far away. This allows for them to group together more closely nearby the player, and spread when the player goes away.

Scene

To create a realistic looking scene, I first built a simple table. I added a plane with fabric physics in blender to quickly create the napkin. I made the hand fairly low poly but spent some time making a great normal map.

The light bulbs use a custom shader with an orange emissive color multiplied to a fresnel effect, so that it glows on the edges. I added a bit of variations over time and some reflections. The filament on the inside is a 2D texture with emissive. Using a Bloom/Glow and a fog post process effects, it gives a strong mood to the scene.

Results

The game ranked 37th out of 805 compo submissions (2900 in total). It also ranked under 100th in all categories but fun, which is indeed the weakest aspect of the game. I was confident in the graphics category and it ended up ranking 9th, as the game looked really good early during developement.