# Bug hunt

> A platformer where the bugs are actual bugs. Playable at https://www.luannzin.com/lab/bug-hunt

I’m the one in the black hoodie. Every level is a server room full of bugs, and I fix them by throwing a mouse, a keyboard or my headphones at them. The room isn’t on my side either: spikes on the floor, lasers that fire every few seconds and saw blades rolling back and forth, and each one costs a heart. Fix enough bugs and the laptop comes out: a few lines of code, then a rosé beam takes out everything in front of me. Once the room is clean, the exit opens to the next one.

Controls: A and D to move, W to jump, S to crouch, S and W to drop through, click to throw at the cursor, right click for the special, Esc to pause. Arrows, Space, J and K work too. Touch screens get a joystick and buttons.

## How it’s made

There’s no sprite editor behind any of this. A Python script with Pillow draws every pixel from a few rules: the room is line art on black, every shape closed by a 1px line in its own colour, and anything that needs texture or has to fade, like the bugs’ shells, the traps or the bricks sinking into the dark, is ordered dither instead of a gradient. Me included, with one difference: I’m solid shapes instead of outlines, lit from the upper left. The curly hair, the black hoodie, the cargo pants and the white sneakers are a pose and a handful of shapes, drawn by the same script as everything else.

The levels come from a seed, a new one each run: the floor, the gaps, the platforms, the traps and where every bug starts. Since nobody designed them, nobody played them either, so a script grows a few thousand and checks that every gap can be jumped, every trap has floor to land on at both ends and every bug can be reached.