Eating Trees

While it is clear that Alien Bugs was inspired by the classic arcade game centipede, the games are quite different. Instead of the worms-style long insect bouncing off of mushrooms, these are giant individual insects who eat trees while bouncing off of each other. Instead of just being able to shoot up, the player is able to shoot in any direction. And the biggest difference is that the playing area is larger than the screen so the player has to hunt down the insects. Actually, old horror movies such as "Them" is probably as much of an inspiration for this game as centipede was. Come to think of it, they haven't made a giant insect movie in quite a while.

This game was a bit rushed as I was originally going to release this game on the 23rd, but as the Mini-Ludum Dare competition is scheduled for that weekend, I figured that I would get this episode out as quickly as possible. Thankfully, a lot of the code from earlier episodes could be utilized in the creation of this episode.

The most interesting challenge in creating this episode was in the handling of eating trees. If the tree is eaten in four quadrants, the possible eating combinations can easily be represented using binary bits for each quadrant.  This means that 16 tiles are needed to represent all possible eating combinations.

Actually eating the trees initially appeared problematic. The new tree state is based on the current state combined with the eating direction. This would result in overly-complex conditional statements but I quickly realized this work could all be pre-computed. By simply having arrays of next-state for each possible tree-state it is simply a matter of looking up the next state. There are a couple of flaws with this system. First is that when you have multiple bugs eating the same tree, there will be cases where the tree is eaten while one of the bugs will continue eating the tree. Likewise, two bugs eating a single quarter of the tree will not eat that quarter faster than a single bug eating it. These problems are not overly noticeable so it is not worth the effort to solve these problems.