Bugnauts! is a third-person action game that mixes accessible 3D projectile gameplay with environmental education. Players play as Chloe, a young aspiring entomologist who must use her bug net to defeat the giant Phantom Bugs that have overtaken the island she calls home. The game balances playful combat with discovery of the world.
Role
Lead Producer
Tools
Unreal Engine 5, Perforce, Google Suite, ClickUp
Timeline
32 Weeks
A full playthrough I found on YouTube.
Contributions
Bugnauts! was selected as a year long Advanced Game Project at USC Games. My main contributions were:
Creating a production pipeline for the game.
Recruitment and onboarding.
Organizing weekly team meetings.
Managing a team of 40+ collaborators across two schools.
Process
I learned a lot on Bugnauts!. I was tasked with making the game a reality on a shoestring budget. We made some good decisions under pressure and also some bad ones. Cicada was one of those bad ones. While I’m happy with what we were able to accomplish with Cicada—a tool meant to increase communication among our various teams—it ultimately consumed the attention of the production department. This would have been great if we had significantly more time and money to make our game. Still, the concept of hyper-fluid cross-team collaboration interests me. It’s an endeavor I hope to revisit under the right circumstances. The video to the left is an early demo I recorded for the team. It showcases the Discord front end we were building. Other services offered similar functionality, but they cost money! And we needed a “free plan” for 45 members. That’s what drove us to create this beast.