You're thumb-sized. The backyard is a jungle. And the Mower is coming.

Bugtopia is a survival-sandbox where the wildlife is your workforce, your mount and your muscle. Tame ants to haul your loot, beetles to tank the hits, spiders to rig silk lines across the grass. Build a base, feed your colony, and hold out against the yard's predators.

🐜 Ants — haulers    🪲 Beetles — tanks    🕷️ Spiders — riggers   and more...

▶️ Play it free in your browser: https://sam-palumbo.itch.io/bugtopia

It's early days and actively in development — which is exactly why I want your input. Play it, break it, and tell me what you'd want to see next. Every comment shapes where this goes. 👇

Great news! We’ve added some exciting new features:

• Saddles for Tamed Bugs: You can now equip your tamed bugs with saddles!
• Bug Inventories: Tamed bugs now have their own inventory slots for extra storage.
• Scaling Wolf Spider Spawns: The number of Wolf Spiders increases with each passing night (capped at 8).
• New Alchemical Drops: Defeated Wolf Spiders now drop crafting ingredients for status-enhancing potions.

# Development Logs

## Phase 0 — Setup

- Godot 4.7.2 scaffold, design docs, platform strategy (web-first → desktop → mobile)

- MVP definition, player journey, build order

## Phase 1 — The MVP loop

- World clock + hunger + foraging — day/night cycle, eat-on-interact

- The Flowerbed map — ASCII-grid iso terrain, camp, sealed SE berry grove

- Inventory + workbench crafting — material pickups, gear recipes (harness, snare); deliberately no weapon

- The ant — passive-feed tame, rideable first mount, seed-cache hauling

- Wolf spider predator — night spawn, stalk/hunt AI, campfire refuge; jumping spider — snare-and-tire tame, vault + silk bridging, a Bug subclass

- Camp systems — bedroll sleep, campfire light, pens

- Death & respawn — dropped pack at death site, resurgence at camp; world not reset

## Phase 2 — Post-MVP expansion

- The beetle — armoured tank mount, charge + clod-barrier ramming

- Walk animation, impact feel, shared hints — walk_bob, hint_label, camera shake, hit sparks

- Mounted combat — attacks as data per species, facing fixes, reach rework; bug health + permadeath, health bars, mounted HUD panel

- Food as the healing system, wolf spider hunt-tell, F1 debug panel (debug builds only)

- Real pack — inventory screen, carry limits (20), item slots/blurbs, drop 1/half/all, ground-pile merging, floating roll-up window

- Field journal — one-line next-goal + J list, keyed hints, eventual 36-goal chain with counts, shopping lists and waypoints

- Stable — follow/heal toggle (C), names, per-animal bags, tonics (stats raise health/bite/speed/bags), stable screen (B) with feed/pen/rename

## Phase 3 — Survival & ownership

- Night escalates — one new wolf spider per night, cap 8; wolf spider killable only from saddle, drops carcass + venom gland

- Saddles & snares as ordinary items, saddles drawn on tamed sprites; riding/pens/bench move off E (→ M, B, Z), one-screen-at-a-time subwindows

- Save & exit + autosave (dawn, focus-lost, 2-min timer); save as JSON, one slot

- Night hunts the stable; pens = mending + the only safe ground; bugs flee to firelight, lone animals bolt

- Animals not walls — creature/player/world collision layers

- Sprint, stamina, food-as-healing, hunger warnings in four bands; death names its cause

- Day track on HUD — drawn sky strip, sunrise sweep on waking

## Phase 4 — The journal layer

- Field mending (G, from saddle or afoot), self-feeding rations in an animal's own bags

- Journal rewritten as a walkable chain; every goal names key, amounts, costs; reachability-aware waypoint marker; key legend column rebuilt off the input map; 30-goal count

- Touch controls — virtual stick + verb pads, auto-detected with override; works with mouse

- Intro animation, logo, animated title screen with press-to-start + Continue/New game row

- Sound (Sep 3) — fully synthesised bank via synth.gd: baião-inspired day/dusk/night score, hunting drums, jingles; five-step volume, starts on Faint; web playback-type fix

- Pitch-black crack redrawn with lit rims; bed/bench/fire/anthill/pens drawn art

## Phase 5 — Endgame & art

- Ants as brewers — fungus farm: fungus dew, toxic fungus, cordyceps; stable-screen vat switches

- Beetle spit — ranged toxic-fungus attack (F); wolf spider becomes a 4th tame (cordyceps bait, heavy snare, wild to tame)

- Art passes: baked at 4px/art-unit then supersampled down, chunky legibility fixes, 2/3-scale ant, mouthpart curves, redrawn rot log/fungus, fluid 3-pose walk for the human

- Shared saddle pool — while mounted, human pack + animal slots are one reach pool; take-what-fits gathering, crafting from the saddle, snares set/picked from the saddle; rider never the target — the mount soaks all hits and permanently dies