Poly-Vinyl Pests is a top down shooter where two players play as ants, alternating between cooperative boss fights and competitive arenas to become Queen of the Anthill.
It was developed from September 2024 to May 2025 with a team of 9-15 people in Unity 5. I worked on the project from the conception phase to first release. While I made contributions to multiple areas of the game, my role evolved over the course of development to primarily work on the user interface and user experience.
UI Concepting
Early on
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Player Controls
The player controls was created with three release versions in mind: a local only demo release, an online release (on the Steam and itch.io platforms), and an arcade version of the game. Therefore, we had to develop multiple different control schemes in mind, each with different amount of buttons available to the player.
Since the beginning of development, we had the goal of creating an arcade version of the game, which would likely have much less controls available to the player than other control schemes. With this in mind, we focused on creating the gameplay to require fewer controls during each section of gameplay. In the end, the game never requires more than three buttons, and two analog sticks to either play the core gameplay or navigate the menus and UI.
Player Dialogue
Our game also has many quips and barks said by the bosses or the player ants over the course of the game. The barks add a lot of personality to the game, and was absolutely needed to complete the experience of Poly-Vinyl Pests. However, there was always the worry that the barks would intrude on the gameplay, and we had to determine where and when was the best time to trigger the quips.
After several iterations and testing sessions, we found that the boss barks were not very intrusive during battle, especially since there were some moments of downtime during parts of the fight where the boss’ heath was not a concern. This also give us leeway to use the barks to convey important information in the fight, such as how to dodge or counter new attacks that players might encounter.
The ant barks also added lots of personality to the fight, but we found that there was potential that they could obscure the player’s play space during critical moments. Therefore, we only activated them during specific times, such as before fights, after fights, and the results.
However, there was one spot where we found that mid fight barks needed to be used. The finale’s ruleset was often found to be confusing to new players, and would require several forms of communication to convey the rules of the gamemode. Part of the solution we utilized was to have barks trigger during key parts of the fight, but have those barks specifically be much more transparent than usual.
Upgrades and Abilities
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Playtest Organization and Analysis
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Closing Thoughts
You can download and play it here on Steam.