Updated Museum Level
Up until now, Bug Off had a single level to play, and its colors were mostly black and white, making the overall feel too strict for the bug-squashing theme.
With update v0.4.1, the existing Museum level lighting has been updated to make it more pleasing to the eye. Here you can see the new look of the Museum level.
New Levels
To add more variety to the game, patch v0.4.1 introduces two new levels: Mansion and Rural.
Mansion
This is a dark indoor level with mostly warm chandelier lighting and some blue moonlight passing through the windows. The bugs look especially nice here thanks to their glowing shells and outlines. I will talk more about this later in the post.
Rural
This level breaks the original idea of the game taking place entirely indoors. However, the game needed a cozy touch, so I decided to take the risk and make this level outdoors, with bright warm sunlight, green grass and trees, and a wooden cabin to make it feel even more cozy and alive.
New Bugs
The new levels introduced new challenges to the game's design.
With a single level and lighting setup, it was enough to mark right and wrong bugs by adding differently colored glowing backs. However, in the new levels, the old bugs no longer looked as intended.
In the dark Mansion level, bugs became hard to see because they were dark as well. In the outdoor Rural level, the red and yellow glowing backs became too bright, making it difficult to distinguish which bugs were correct and which were not.
As a result, the entire bug design was reworked. Instead of glowing backs, bugs are now fully different colors: bugs to squash are red, wrong bugs are white and bugs that reduce score are black.
Since changing colors alone was not enough to make the bugs look good in every level, the new bugs now have a glowing outline. This makes them clearly visible in both dark and bright environments.
Other Changes
Achievements
There were achievements for squashing specific numbers of bugs, such as 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000. However, I realized these were extremely hard to reach. So hard that even I, who plays the game more than anyone else, could not achieve them.
Because of this, I decided to reduce the requirements to 2,000, 5,000, and 10,000, respectively. These numbers feel about right, as I am close to reaching the last one myself.
Async Level Loading Screen
The new levels have more objects, textures, and details than the original one, so they take longer to load. To make this feel smoother, I changed how levels load. The game no longer freezes during loading; instead, it now shows a progress bar so you can see that everything is working properly.
Last Goal Time
The final goal about squashing 100 bugs, is the one I struggle with the most, so I decided to increase the time limit by about 10%. It is still hard to complete, though.
The Rest
These were the most noticeable changes. There are also smaller changes and bug fixes included in this patch. If you find something I haven't fixed yet, please let me know in the comments so I can add it to my list.