My video game has bugs that crawl around the screen and attack your servers

We had a revelation this week. The core game loop for Tech Debt wasn’t quite as engaging as I wanted. Events happened like DDoS attacks, but they felt flat.

Then, about 4 am on Tuesday, it hit me: We needed to bring these events to life. We needed to anthropomorphise them into characters that crawl around your screen and perform actions.

I jumped out of bed and whipped up a little walk, idle, and death animation, then coded up the NPCBug class, which would run around and eat items and network packets.

That quickly evolved to multiple classes of bugs, some that evolved into a bug that directly attacks your servers, forcing them to freeze.

In order to get rid of these creatures, you have to assign your team members to “Debug” the bugs.

It really brought the game to life.

Other miscellaneous additions include a rewards screen, which doesn’t quite fit in its current iteration but I should have that fixed soon.

Updated the tutorial to include bugs and release rewards.

There is an “Attention Icon” that tells you when there are available actions for you to take.

Started to experiment with more thematic fonts.

Reworked NPC pathfinding so they actually stand in the right spot when interacting with certain objects.

What's next:

I am going to add a “rarity” system for level up, both release and NPC. Then I will start to expand the number of level-ups. If you play for even a little while, you will see that there is a lack of variety.

Don’t worry, I have plenty of ideas, and it should be easy to implement when the time is right.

From there, hopefully, I can start adding back in the ability to hire more NPCs of varying levels.

That's it. In its current state, with the addition of bugs, it could use a rebalancing, as I think it's just a tad on the difficult side.

Feel free to give it a play and let me know your thoughts on it. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.