Earlier today I discovered an ant in my bathroom. The thing about discovering an ant is that there is always another ant. And another ant. Ant another ant. Antnother ant. Antnothant. I believe I’ve found the hive’s point of ingress, a pin-sized hole in a skirting board. I’ve taped it up. We will see what happens next. Incidentally, if you are my landlord, please do not leap to any wild conclusions about how often I’m cleaning the floor.

Anyway! Dusk and Iron Lung developer David Szymanski is making a new isometric shooter called B.U.G.B.I.T.E. He hasn’t formally announced the game yet, but he’s been quietly blogging about the thing for several months, and the new game appears to involve ants. Giant ants who live in spoiling industrial labyrinths the colour of finely aged urine. How very unlike my bathroom floor, a realm of blinding purity with the occasional rogue inverterbate, just for charm.

“The game is set 400 years in the future after several civilizations have risen and experienced different catastrophic events, and humans now live burrowed into the mountains of trash from those civilizations, hence the cobbled-together look,” explains one Bluesky thread from October. “I’ve learned my lesson from Iron Lung and I’m slowly building a fairly extensive lore bible for this game, even though it’s ‘just’ an isometric shooter. The story and world are an integral component to making the action engaging here, even if the action is center stage.”

Szymanski has experimented with having an actual ant colony’s worth of ants visible in B.U.G.B.I.T.E, but currently feels that “there are significant diminishing returns after like a few hundred enemies onscreen and it works better to spawn less enemies over a longer period of time vs tons of enemies at once”. Still, he’s planning to include a level editor, so people can stunlock their computers by simulating as many insects as they please.

As regards the look, Szymanski is taking inspiration from what he calls the “‘brown and bloom’ era of games, with “heavy use of saturated lighting to ‘color in’ the environments and pops of standout color for gameplay-relevant things, and a general soft/blown-out look for lights sources and effects.” In another post, he jokes that “I won’t be happy unless I piss off at least one person for ‘bringing back piss filters'”, referring to a certain, aha, stylised golden sheen cultivated by blockbusty action games of the noughties and early 2010s – the likes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Gears of War. It’s been decades, and I still don’t understand why “piss filters” became a thing. Perhaps one of you can fill in the picture.

“Been working on B.U.G.B.I.T.E for more than a year now but I still haven’t actually announced it, explained it to people, put up a Steam page, set a release date, or for that matter started on finished level content,” Szymanski wrote in a Bluesky update this week, the update that (together with the unaccountable presence of an ant in my very sanitary bathroom) inspired me to write this post. “I dunno if I’m cooking or becoming cooked,” he confessed. Why not both, etc. We’ll hear more in due course.