We finished our entry for Bevy Jam 6 last week. Bevy is an ECS-based game engine written in Rust, and it's pretty nice! Our entry, A Fistful of Boomerangs was by far the largest game project I've completed to date, and I'm pretty proud of what our team was able to achieve in a week.

>>> Play the game here! <<<

I implemented some features like the grainy film effect and boomerang chaining between enemies while in "aim mode," but my favorite part by far was the enemy AI. To make the enemies follow the player around obstacles in a freeform environment (as opposed to a grid, which most of my previous games have taken place on) I had to look into navmesh libraries and pathfinding on those generated navmeshes. Thankfully, there's already a really nice solution in the oxidized navigation crate. After a bit of trial and error, enemies could follow the player around the entire level. The cool thing about this crate is that it generates the navmesh at runtime, so if your level geometry changes it'll adjust the possible paths enemies can take to compensate.

Unfortunately, a week is too short to implement every idea we had, if we had another several weeks I'd have loved to see some more features like:

• more levels with some kind of "hub" in between for equipment upgrades
• an endless mode with ramping difficulty to challenge the advanced players
• more art, although the minimalist style worked really well with the old film look we went with

Overall, this was a really fun project and I had a lot of fun (and learned a ton)!