E. coli

Making the media for the blood plates hadn’t been too bad. I had never used any type of digital program like Photoshop or Inkscape before, so I chose one and started creating. Plates are basically round, so that was no problem.

BLOOD PLATE made in inkscape by me

I found some great tutorials on YouTube from a channel called TJFREE. It took me about a month to go through most of them. Then, I started working on our friend here.

pissed off E. coli

My next problem was figuring out how to program the AI in this little guy to move. But then something unexpected happened—I realized I didn’t have to figure it out on my own at all. All I had to do was ask my wonderful microbiologist friends, and they would tell me how these organisms moved under the microscope.

It was the weirdest thing, too. I started looking forward to going to work just to talk about biology because my brain was associating it with game development. To this day, I’m not sure if it was some backdoor way of getting me to like biology, but hey, it worked.

This is my first iteration of E. coli. The movement was good, but it quickly became clear they needed a collision system.

I rewrote a section of the code: if one of the E. coli gets within a certain distance of another E. coli, it will call a method that changes its direction. This seemed to improve the E. coli movement, making it appear as though they had a more random movement pattern as well. I also added colliders to the E. coli so they wouldn’t seem to hide behind each other.

It soon became clear that the game needed something more—something the old Fruit Ninja games had been lacking: a protagonist. I wanted to find my Yoda in this sea of Sith bacteria, and on the Unity Asset Store, for 32 bucks and some change, I did just that. Meet SHINOBI.

SHINOBI

Programming while preserving the classic Fruit Ninja mechanics, however, was a different story.