Fly Swarm, a game for the SDL weekly assignment, featuring a modified creative-commons-licensed picture from flickr ( Link ).
I wanted the user to understand how a swarm of flies might feel when being hunted by humans.
I thought from the start that I wanted to put a layer of randomization between the user and the flies because the flight path of flies is usually very seemingly random. In order to balance this, I decided to have the user control a swarm of flies instead of just one.
In terms of hunting the flies, I decided fly swatters would be most iconic. As for them appearing, I decided that having them just appear would be unfair. I thus decided there should be a short period with a shadow before the swatter hits, giving the player some time to flee. However, because usually people move very fast when swatting flies, I made this time short enough that it will be very difficult to dodge it if it appears over the swarm.
There are many games involving swatting flies. However, I could not think of any with flies avoiding swatting. There are some games that involve avoiding falling objects, but these are usually from a side perspective and have direct control over the avoider. By moving the view overhead and using a semi-random swarm, this changes the gameplay, forcing the player to feel loss even if they tried to avoid the swatter.
I feel like the end results work very well. The swatter is random and moves fast enough that it is almost impossible to avoid it every time. You thus always lose some flies, forcing the player to feel the loss that the swarm would feel. Leaving the flies as red smears really seems to help drive home the fact that your flies are, well, dropping like flies. Also, fading to red at the end really drives home the fact that the entire swarm is dead.