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:

https://youtu.be/lesOmZZ8YEc

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:

GAMEPAD (Xbox Layout)

On Foot

• Left Stick - Move
• Right Stick - Rotate Camera
• Left Bumper - sprint
• A - Jump
• B - pick up corpse
• X - throw corpse

While Riding a Hornet

• Left Stick - Move
• Right Stick - Rotate Camera
• A - Fly Up
• Y - dismount hornet without killing it
• X - Attack with hornet
• Right Bumper - Launch Hornet
• Mini Game - press X or B 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.

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 - Fixed game softlocking if player flies too far down while on a hornet - Fixed player clipping through ground when falling at high speeds - Fixed glitch where player gets stuck in unresponsive state when trying to grab after already grabbing something - Fixed weight counter breaking when throwing hornet in some cases - Increased hornet spawn rate to try and make the game harder - Fixed player movement speed and jump height variations on different machines - Fixed player getting stuck in idle state occasionally - Fixed weight calculation for hornets.