Butterfly Game Planning

Game Purpose: Allow students to learn about cost/reward in foraging for butterflies.

Planned Features:

• Butterfly flies is able to change directions and come to rest. ✓
• Wing flap rate changes to give the appearance of randomness Wing flap rate changes based on behavior. ✓
• Butterfly can come to rest on objects and will slow wing flap when it does ✓
• Birds occasionally try to eat the butterfly –Level 2
• Energy drains from the butterfly during flight ✓ This works bun needs to be refined.
• Stopping on flowers adds energy
  • Different flowers give different amounts of energy ✓ This works, but needs to be refined.
    • Purple flowers are preferred, then red, last white
    • Clustered flowers preferred, then daisy-like, large single flowers last
    • http://dev-www.amnh.org/Explore/Resources/Young-Naturalist-Award-Winners/2011/Butterfly-Buffet-The-Feeding-Preferences-of-Painted-Ladies
  • Stopping too long increases chance that a bird will come — Level 3
• Being in sunlight warms the butterfly and they fly faster for the same energy cost — Level 4
• Being in shade lowers speed.
  • Maybe changes based on time of day?
• Goal is to get to a surplus of energy so that they have enough energy to mate-
• Need to add win screen and death screen
• Need to add instructions

Stretch Goals

• Additional levels
  • Find a mate
  • Laying eggs on the plants that help with survival

State of the Game 4/8/21

4/12/21 Update

This week I was able to get the animation to change based on the player behavior. The butterfly flaps faster when flying up, and slows when there is no horizontal movement. I tweaked the gravity settings as well. I added in the two most remote backgrounds and scripted them to move at different rates (parallax) depending on which direction the butterfly is flying. Some more tweaks will be needed to the speeds once all the elements are added in. The backgrounds were painted by me in Adobe Fresco for the iPad.

4/17/21 Update

Several new features have been added. I’ve added in a new midground that also parallaxes. I’m not thrilled with the way the transparency is appearing, and plan to work on it more later. There is an energy/health bar in the upper right hand corner. Flying depletes energy, flying upward not only makes the butterfly flap faster, energy is depleted faster. Flowers have been added that the butterfly can land on. I’m not sure that these will be the final images. I am working on painting some images of my own… we’ll see how that comes out… Landing on a flower starts to increase the butterfly’s energy bar. Some flowers give more energy than others. A neat detail is that if the butterfly lands on the flower from above, they will not pass through the flower, but they can still pass through the flower from below, allowing them to then land on the upper side.

5/3/21 Update

The watercolor background has been abandoned. All flowers have been implemented with differing nectar values and landing zones. Random spawning of both grass and flowers has been added. It took a surprisingly long time to get everything to spawn in the correct locations, and the method for creating new items could probably be streamlined. Next up is to implement death and victory screens. After that predators need to be added, and maybe competition from other butterflies?