Development 3: Art

As someone who's probably too comfortable making games in 2D with Game Maker Studio, I usually default design decisions to top-down perspective. The trick here is two fold, depth and behavior. A person from the top down view is just the top of their head and some of their shoulders. If you're going the extra mile, you can include feet / walking animations, which I will get to eventually for this Bees game. But translating who the kids are versus the adult ultimately came down to a few different simple ideas: make the kids random colors, make them occasionally present horizontally, and make them a little bit smaller than the main character. As the game starts and the new kids start showing up, they're always a random color (random numbers up to 255 for red, blue, and green). (The same applies to the squirt guns, just for potential fun color combinations.) I didn't want to include any sort of mortality in the game, so kids get stung and knocked out until the parent resuscitates them, which is the perfect situation for a kid laying down horizontally. This shows the player explicitly that these are children and something has gone horribly wrong. These are the little pieces that players can put together to get the gravity of the situation.