Bug Smash

Bug Smash was made using xna gamestudio in Visual Studio. As group lead I was involved in helping each group member complete their part of the project, in addition to my own developmental tasks. This position gave me a chance to be a part of all aspects of the development process.

The basic mechanics of Bug Smash are quite simple, the player squishes bugs that are continously approaching their picnic blanket. Every time a bug reaches the blanket, the player loses a life. The game ends when the player reaches zero lives. Our group managed to execute most of the goals we had for the game, and the only obstacle we couldn’t overcome was the bugs occasionally clumping together.

There were two parts to this project, making a functioning game and an external tool. The external tool was defined as being “a separate program that modified the game’s files in some way”. My group’s external tool was a program that changed the image files the game used during gameplay. We wanted our program to be able to throw any image into the game as directed by the player. The main challenge was getting around xna gamestudio’s ability to only load assets from the specifically designated content folder (the images players would want to load would be in some other folder). We got around this by combining the filepaths of the user’s files and the location of the content folder. Every time the player hits the start button the game checks to see if alternate images are available. There is a preference for new images, and the game will load them instead of the default image files. The player can then successfully change the entire look of the game via whatever .png image file they choose.