Satisfaction: a roach game in 25 hours

In 2014 I made a small mobile game in Unity on contract. Its working title was Bugs, in the store it was Satisfaction, and the help screen said “Squash the roaches!!”.

The main menu. All the art came from the client: screens at 2560×1600 and 1280×800, the bugs, the buttons, frames of cracking glass.

The rules.

• Roaches run across the screen, and you squash them with your finger.
• Don’t touch the black roach.
• Every miss costs 5% of the screen’s durability. At zero the game is over.
• The first squashed roach gives 1 point, each next one without a miss gives one more than the last. A miss resets the streak to one.
• Giant roaches crack the screen but give 10 bonus points.
• Every 100 points restore the screen to 100%.

The help screen with the rules.

The sheet. Before starting I broke the work into tasks and estimated each one, and as I went I wrote down the time spent. The estimate came to 26.75, the time spent to 24.93 — within the estimate. Here is part of the sheet:

Task	Estimate	Spent
Bugs config	1	0.5
Bugs move	1	0.5
Kill bug	1	0.5
Miss bug, durability	1	0.5
Black bug	1	0.5
Bugs prefabs	2	2.75
Main menu	4	1.65
Animated scores	2	2
Ads	4	2
Size optimizations	1	2
Total	26.75	24.93

The tasks that looked simplest — movement, kills, misses — took half an hour each. The things around the game ran over: bug prefabs with animation and shrinking the build size.

The Android build: the game screen and Game Over in Russian.

In the autumn the client brought a new design: different fonts, the title Satisfaction instead of Smashing Game, a refreshed Game Over screen. I put that in too.

Eight years later I came back to roaches — this time to the biology of a roach that gets tired.