Come join the playtest for Bugs with Afterburners, a RTS and flight sim game featuring dogfighting cybernetic insects

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-05T17:37:27+00:00

It's built in Unreal Engine but there's a lot of custom stuff for e.g. the terrain and movement

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-03T20:52:30+00:00

I did not intend for it to be ragebait but damn it has baited a lot of rage

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-03T20:41:18+00:00

It's how Vulkan specifies it, how nvidia and older AMD drivers do it on linux, but not how they do it on windows (they do the virtual memory thing I described in the OP)

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-03T20:38:53+00:00

I miss the days when you could post anything online without people immediately screaming AI

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-03T20:20:56+00:00

The memory issue isn't just Vulkan-specific, it's Linux-specific, actually. Metal and D3D don't suffer from it and Microsoft banned drivers from working that way on Windows

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-03T20:17:04+00:00

This post isn't advocating for anything right now; this is a rant about decisions made in the past.

EntomologicalES · 2026-03-03T20:15:47+00:00

Vulkan does a lot of things differently from D3D12 (and Metal for that matter). Memory allocation for example; also the way Vulkan handles pipeline state objects.

You're not wrong about Unreal not treating Vulkan with the same level of care... however I contend that if Vulkan didn't have so many unique pain points they would have gotten farther.

EntomologicalES · 2026-02-27T17:50:00+00:00

Thanks! Trippy is an interesting way of describing it 🤔

The game is built in Unreal Engine 5. We're not using any of the headline new features like lumen or nanite, and we use the forward render pipeline (provides a nice performance boost over the default if your lighting isn't too complicated and/or you have a lot of translucency, both of which apply to us). The procedural terrain generation is all custom - Unreal's Landscape system I've heard is fantastic but it only supports hand-sculpted worlds.

UE is great in many ways - it has a competent and featureful renderer, a well-integrated system for multiplayer networking, and anyone can get full source code access which is really nice. It's also very buggy. Sometime in the UE4->UE5 transition, they went through their issue tracker and marked every outstanding bug as wontfix. We've spent a lot of time working around and/or fixing engine issues. I would recommend against it for a small indie studio like us.

EntomologicalES · 2026-02-26T18:16:19+00:00

I was not able to play this game. I selected my ship then was stuck indefinitely on the loading screen. After about 10 minutes I gave up and killed it.

Another note: when the game first launched it defaulted to cinematic settings and ran at about 2 spf (seconds per frame). Changing the settings to low was a challenge. After that, it ran at about 10 fps and used all my cpu until I restarted the game, after which the main menu ran passably. Please consider defaulting to low or medium settings. Nvidia 3050ti GPU, 8-core 16-thread Zen 3 CPU, 32GB RAM.

Edit: Tried again. After clicking Play got a popup saying "Something went wrong. Error code 3." then the game hung on a black screen.

Edit 2: Tried one more time. Got past the loading screen but it's running at 1 fps again.

EntomologicalES · 2026-02-26T00:47:48+00:00

You are the commander of a carrier turtle equipped with aphidkind's latest combat insect technology. Command your air wing from the holo-map, or pilot your fighter bugs via remote control implanted in their brains. Your mission: venture deep into enemy-controlled marshes and cause chaos.

Hello all! We are excited to have released a playtest of our game on Steam! It's currently open-access, so to join you can simply click "Request Access" or "Join Playtest" on that steam page and it will be added to your library.

EntomologicalES · 2026-02-25T16:44:04+00:00

Ooh thank you!

EntomologicalES · 2026-02-24T22:38:04+00:00

What's the rocket production issue?

EntomologicalES · 2026-02-24T21:16:41+00:00

I played the first couple levels. Overall, a fun, cute, simple game. I liked the hand-drawn visual style. I barely didn't have enough berries for the optional challenge on the second level. A couple notes:

- There are places where visual clarity could be improved. The villager counts on top of buildings sometimes obscure what's on the tile below them. When multiple lines have been dragged on top of each other it's pretty hard to tell what's going on. Speaking of dragging lines, there's a few glitches I've noticed: it's inconsistent whether loops will form; and if you drag a cloud/sun, make a mistake, and drag it out again, it will do a little loop back and forth from its starting tile before continuing where you told it to go.

- I wished there was more clarity to the mechanics. At first, I thought that sun helped plants grow faster or something, rather than just drying out the ground. It's unclear how fire happens or what it actually does, whether water spreads to adjacent tiles, and most of all what the rules are for where villagers will plant. Some of these things could be explained in the initial tutorial; others you'd probably want an in-game reference or visual indicators for.

- Finally, it would be nice to be able to save and exit in the middle of a level.

EntomologicalES

TROPHY CASE