Beetle Uprising News

Beetle Uprising has a release date! Breed more beetles, juice the bad ones! Take over the Abandoned Lot and avenge the matriarch on 5th November 2020, when we'll be leaving early access. As well as the full set of levels, the full release introduces Mystery Mode, with random rewards to add a little twist to proceedings.

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Keep an eye our the Beetle Uprising social media - Facebook and Twitter - for more information as we approach this date!

TIme for another quick behind-the-scenes look at Beetle Uprising!



This is a screenshot of the nest. It shows a small navigable area near the exit. Over time, as you level up, the nest gets bigger - this is done by removing the rocks around the border (some are highlighted here).

They are set up to block navigation dynamically, so once they are disabled and disappear from the scene, the floor underneath opens up for use by the beetles and for placing objects. We adjusted things so the navigable area is a little ways from the walls and you don't see Beetles penetrating them, although very large beetles are big enough that sometimes their legs might stick through as they turn around in a corner.

As the expansion rocks are removed new nest lighting is activated, so the floor beneath them looks cheerful and safe. You can also see 4 big rectangular patches of "fence" around the nest so a player cannot click outside and drive Beetles crazy trying to navigate somewhere impossible, or place a tasty snack out of reach.

Continuing our short look at some of the behind-the-scenes goings on with Beetle Uprising, this time we're talking about the navmesh.

Below is a screenshot of the Unity navmesh editor. It shows one of our earlier levels with the navmesh highlighted. We use terrain steepness to limit walkability, and have a few invisible "fence" objects (you can see some straight blocks that cut the nav mesh) we use to keep players and enemies from wandering outside the play area.



We needed to keep players from clicking on navmesh that is auto-generated but is outside the play area, so we wrote code that determines if a click is pathable from a few "starting locations" that are inside the play area. We needed more than one of those objects to deal with situations where doors open and change the play area. If you run your mouse over a map, you can see the cursor change to indicate that you are inside or outside the legal area.

We would sometimes have bugs where enemy spawners would not push beetles into the play area, because we like them coming out of holes and other difficult bits of terrain. They might fall through the floor, or pile up inside a cave. So tweaking the spawner location was always fun. Something else about spawners: they have a starting location, but also an implicit move-to is given to each enemy with an optional remote location. This makes it seem like the bugs rush out when triggered, then gather in a staging area, waiting until their Perception area overlaps with one of your beetles. Then the fight is on!

We thought we'd share some behind-the-scenes stuff from the development of Beetle Uprising, as we approach the full release!



Here's a screenshot of David's egg editor. He built a custom Unity Inspector to label genes and give himself drop downs to tweak the genes given out with a particular egg. In Beetle Uprising, most of your best beetles will come from generations of cross-breeding, but every so often you’ll need to add fresh genetics to the gene pool which come from beetle eggs.

In this shot, We’re looking at the "Best Stats" egg. It shows part of the visual genes, and a bit of the attack type genes. Here, different genes control morph targets in the beetle 3D model (such as making spikes or width or legs different sizes). Similar genes control the custom shader which gives you visuals such as color, iridescence, stripes, or masks. Once a beetle is hatched, its properties are fixed. If you want a different look or ability, you'll need to breed or acquire new eggs from missions.

As most of you who supported our little beetle breeding experiment will know, progress has been slow for a while. We’ve been itching to finish the game off for a long time and so the original development team has pledged to work together remotely to push it out of Early Access.

The last public game update was April 29/18. Since then, we have:

- Unlocked the final two missions on the map: 17&18, including the final game win flyout celebration and Steam Achievement.
- All new, streamlined Nest and Beetle Collection UI.
- Better hints for attack types in mission set up and in combat.
- Updated Beetle Uprising logo.
- Improved genetic display UI.
- Removed a few unwanted bugs. But left in all the bugs we really wanted.

For anyone who wants to get really stuck into the nitty gritty of breeding, we’ve got a new video explaining how everything works so you can refine your tactics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ym7QUlZDSw

We’d also like to announce our collaboration with Slug Disco Studios, makers Empires of the Undergrowth (another great insect themed game) who are helping us spread the word about Beetle Uprising. They’re hosting our new forum, and will be handling a lot of our social media from now on so we can concentrate on making changes to the game.

Thanks for sticking with us!