Rush Bee Ranger

Back in school at Grafisch Lyceum Utrecht we had one project period where we got to work for an actual client. The client was Faunawatch. An organisation supporting animal welfare. The goal of the project was to create a game that displays and promotes the organisation and its activities.

Inspired by games like Tokyo 42 and Monument Valley, we decided to build an isometric puzzle game where you would move through a futuristic scifi city and solve puzzles to power up generators that power highly advanced bee hotels. These bee hotels would piece by piece help recolor the world and make everything more alive. Just like in real life the bees are a big and important part of life in this game.

The concept is fairly simple, you walk around in a futuristic city, you control your character and you progress through the city puzzle by puzzle. Each puzzle is solved by rotating tiles in the correct position so power can flow through them. Once the power reaches the destination it will activate the bee hotel. Activiating bee hotels slightly desaturates the entire world around you and allows you to progress to the next section and next puzzle. Once all puzzles are completed and all bee hotels are active there is a little cutscene where you make your escape to help the environment in new places.

For this project I worked together in a group of 4 people with me being the only programmer on the team. I worked together with three artists, two of which specializing in 3D, one for the environments and world building and one for the characters. And a 2D artist for the textures and decals. To help keeping things organized we made use of tools like Trello for task tracking, Git/GitLab for version control and collaboration and Discord for communications. During my studies this was probably my most well organised group projects and felt the most close to working in an actual studio I have had before working in actual game studios during my internships and career.

The project was so well received by peers and our teachers that it was suggested to us to sign our project up for the Dutch Game Awards in the student catagory. The competition was fierce competing with games like We Were Here and Pool Party Panic. We could already see we didn't really have a reallistic chance at winning anything. But seeing our game next to these games and competing in the same catagory was still very satisfying and rewarding.

Looking back at this project code wise it definitly wasn't the most sophisticated and if I were to build this project again today there is a lot I would have done differently. I have since learned a lot and grown as a programmer. But at the same time it is still one of my proudest achievements since it is a very polished project considering it was build in only 2 months by a group of students and was very well received by peers. Also the time working on this project was a lot of fun with some great people.

The trailer for this project can be seen here.