Assets [WIP] Seasonal Insects

Hello everybody! I would like to first introduce myself and why I even began this system! My name is Isaac and I am the owner of AFK Society, since I began using unity over 6 years ago I fell in love with creating worlds from nothing and letting my imagination run wild, I found myself now analyzing every game I played. Wondering how they achieved their own implementations that I found fascinating. One huge aspect of developing a game is Immersion, which I have always had an issue understanding what that really entails. Until I noticed It was the small things coming together in a blend that end up creating the world in such a way that even little details matter.

Showcase Video:

What is true immersion? Something that keeps you invested in this made-up world you are now apart of. I am a fan of fantasy/medieval open-world games, Skyrim for example being to this day one of the most popular games released in that genre. It was in this game that I envisioned Seasonal Insects while exploring the vast forest of Skyrim I came across a stump, that had ants running across it.

This amazed me! Even though it was just 2D animated textures of ants, it was an amazing addition to a forest! I would run around in games only seeing bushes, maybe some butterflies and woodland animals. Where are the little details? Worms, snails, crickets, caterpillars, spiders that can bite you? So I began to research if this existed in any known games, I was unable to find really anything that mentioned the insects in games.

I figured after a while that something like having tons of insects would almost be like having too many blades of grass and be too cost-efficient. Still, that didn't turn me away, having a world where there was more than just animals and humanoids was now an addiction to me. That is where I end my rant and start to showcase where I am at today!

Explaining The System:
Adding insects randomly around the place was not enough for the focus of immersion, insects are in tune with the seasons so I decided to create a full-blown seasonal insect system. Based on the settings you place on insects they will start as the adult insect, lay eggs during mating season and these eggs will hatch into larva during hatching season. Depending on the insect they will stay in tune with the seasons and grow accordingly, migrate or die off. Once the year is over, it all restarts.

Features:
[X] Season System
[X] Morph System (Egg, Larva, Adult, etc)
[X] Flocking/Swarms
[X] Mating
[X] Interactable (Grab, Avoid, Etc)
[X] Migration Season
[X] Randomly Generated

Planned Insects:
[x] Butterfly / Caterpillar
[ ] Snail
[ ] Cricket
[ ] Spider
[ ] Ants + Anthill
[ ] Bees / Wasp
[ ] Mosquito

Butterflies & Caterpillars:


If the above explanation was hard to understand this will explain it a bit better. We all know butterflies come from caterpillars. I wanted to start with something basic and common for my first seasonal insect. The butterflies begin with a flocking behavior around a given area.



The butterflies look for flowers to grab pollen at all times when its mating season the butterflies will land on the plants and lay eggs that will be waiting to spawn. The larvae will hatch and start growing overtime after a period they will turn into full-grown caterpillars.



As the larva and caterpillars start living their life, they will do what caterpillars do best, start eating! So we are going to add depth masks to create bite marks on the plants and have it once again, create another little bit of immersion. Once they are large enough and reach near the end of their stage, they will start to head off to the nearest rest position, which usually is a branch or a different plant around 10 meters away.





The final stage is the cocoon and turning into a butterfly, once the butterfly has spawned it will join the rest of the flock and the cocoon will begin to change color to brown, letting you know it doesn't have a butterfly anymore.



Thank you all for reading if you got this far. I will start adding my updates to this post and hope somebody else is as excited as I am! I'm loving seeing my scene come to life with interactable insects. The most amazing part of this all is how you can easily code anything to interact with the bugs separately. For example, want to catch bugs? Easily remove insects from the world and add them to your inventory, have players catch bugs for potions, etc.

Feel free to share ideas, opinions, and coffee. Happy developing friends!

 

great work and inspiration from nature

 

Hello everyone! Ive done some updates and put together a stage slideshow for you! Im going to work on a showcase video for the first insects soon!


Stage 0:
Butterflies lay the eggs!


Stage 1:
After the eggs have been laid the larva will hatch and begin to eat at plants, easily customizable to any prefab plants


Stage 2:
The larva will begin to morph into an adult (working on blendshapes) and move slower.


Stage 3:
When ready the caterpillars will start to look for a place to turn into a cocoon (branches that can be placed in your tree prefabs) you will see caterpillars roam the forest floor


Stage 4:
This is when you will see the caterpillars start climbing trees, heading towards the branch


Stage 5:
The caterpillars will begin to cocoon!


Stage 6:
Cocoons will be seen in trees! Green with life.


Stage 7:
Cocoons spawn new butterflies!


Stage 8:
Cocoon turns brown and dies!

End:
Thanks for reading, working hard on this and have a small knicks to work out still! Let me know your thoughts!

 

Hello everyone! I have been working on the documentation and showcase video which will be up shortly~! For anyone interested in reading the documentation I've uploaded a PDF

 

Hello everyone! I have just released the seasonal butterfly video on youtube!