Shutterbug: Q&A With The Developers

Introducing Shutterbug

As part of the NVM’s Christmas program, Illuminate The Play, Shutterbug will be playable for all visitors to the Museum. Created by Rianna Suen (design and code), Dan Emmerson (design and art) and Dan Pugsley (sound), the videogame centres around taking pictures of insects with a very small camera. While Shutterbug can be played online in a browser, the museum version includes a unique controller, shaped like a beetle.

In October 2024, The National Videogame Museum collaborated with Children’s Capital of Culture to create Plug In and Play, a videogame adventure trail that would take place across various locations in Rotherham. The trail featured both analogue and digital games, one of which included the peaceful bug photography game Shutterbug.

Q&A With The Team Behind Shutterbug

As we prepare to introduce Shutterbug as a playable game at The National Videogame Museum, we recently chatted with the game’s developers about this brilliantly designed and super fun game!

Could you tell us a little more about yourself and the various projects you have worked on?

We (Rianna Suen, Dan Emmerson and Dan Pugsley) met while working on Hollow Ponds’s Flock (2024), also a game about exploring nature and collecting creatures, and have been collaborating on game jams and prototypes ever since. Rianna handles design and code on Shutterbug, while Dan E does design and art, and Dan P is in charge of sound.

Rianna Suen is a serial prototyper and has made games commissioned by the National Poetry Library, Waltham Forest Council, King’s College London, and Now Play This.

Dan Emmerson is an artist – originally an animator turned game-maker. He has worked on a variety of projects including Flock (Hollow Ponds/Annapurna Interactive), Buckshot Roulette IRL (Mother Ultimate/Critical Reflex), and Pudsey’s Gigantic Game (Aardman/Children in Need), as well as many many (unfinished) personal projects.

Dan Pugsley is a sound designer and has worked on many games, hundreds of short films, quite a few adverts, animations and the occasional feature film.

Shutterbug is a brilliant concept and recently featured in our Plug In and Play adventure trail in Rotherham. Could you tell our visitors a little bit about the game?

Shutterbug is a bug photography game about the joy of going out into the woods and discovering pleasant little critters. You inhabit the role of a wildlife photographer, tasked with zooming in on and capturing specific bugs on film. After using up all the film in your camera, you’re presented with all of the photos you’ve taken and encouraged to download your favourites, before heading back out to the woods to take more shots.

The browser-based game is controlled by changing the dimensions and position of the browser window on the screen. The smaller the window, the more zoomed in you are on the woodland scene.

The game was a top marks winner at GMTK Game Jam 2024 and fully deserving of this recognition! What were the processes behind developing the game? Were there any highs or lows?

With the game jam kicking off on the Friday evening, we separately jotted down some ideas for what we could make based on the theme. We then came together on the Saturday to bring our ideas together and by Sunday morning we’d implemented the core mechanic of capturing different objects on the screen. On Sunday we’d decided on the visual theme of bug photography and set about implementing a first greyscale art pass. We also began playtesting with friends at this point. After a brief Monday interlude which included a trip to the seaside, while Dan E sat in a cafe and painted the final bug sprites, we returned on Tuesday to polish up the game, adding missing UI elements, colour the sprites and sound effects!

Our process for game jams focuses on getting to a minimum viable product by the halfway mark, and playtesting with people outside the team as soon as possible. The second half is purely for polish and fixing obvious flaws that our playtesters can easily spot with fresh eyes. During a game jam, you don’t have time to get the fresh perspective that a few days away from a project can provide, so playtesting early and often is extremely valuable.

We’re very excited to bring Shutterbug to the Museum and it proved to be super popular during the trail in Rotherham. Although it’s a browser based game, the version we’re showcasing has a unique controller – how did this bespoke peripheral come about?

As soon as we released the game for the jam, Alex Johansson messaged us excited about the possibilities for extending Shutterbug into an alt-controller game. We were fortunate that Alex was also producing the Plug In and Play game trail in Rotherham alongside David Hayward, and they suggested building a bug shaped controller for the game.

Alex created a blueprint for a bug-inspired peripheral – with joysticks in place of antennas! Dan E made some colour options – keeping colours natural but vibrant, to fit with the look of the game. Alex and David then fabricated the controller, while Rianna adjusted the control scheme to work with joysticks instead of a mouse. Dan E also made an alternate version of the background that included Rotherham landmarks.

At the National Videogame Museum we feel it is vital to celebrate indie developers and bring their work to a wider audience. Why do you feel it is important to have games like Shutterbug represented in the Museum?

Shutterbug took us by surprise with how popular it became – and I think that fits the indie spirit – something made for fun by a small team that people just enjoy. No appealing to trends, no sneaky gambling mechanics. We made a game we wanted to exist.

Shutterbug is very representative of who we are. Rianna enjoys turning technology on its head to create playful experiences, Dan E loves bugs and exploring the woods, and Dan P is highly experienced in making all sorts of weird sounds for a surprising amount of games about collecting creatures.

Are there any projects you’re working on at the moment we should keep an eye out for?

Dan E: Trout Priest is a small, spooky game where you must send undead trout to heaven, by force. https://demmy.itch.io/troutpriest

Rianna: Advent.js is a creative coding advent calendar made by a collective of game developers and creative coders, currently updating daily throughout December. https://adventjs.itch.io/adventjs-2024

Dan P: Up In Smoke is a podcast Dan has just completed work on. Adam Buxton and Mei Mac star in a “true crime” podcast about a fictional event. In 2014 a devastating house fire shatters the quiet life of Greenloch, a rural English village.

Meet The Team behind Shutterbug

Rianna Suen

Rianna Suen is a game designer and developer, and maker of generative knitwear design tools.

Dan Emmerson

Dan Emmerson is an artist who works in games. He has an interest in nature and creatures in general (but bugs, especially).

Dan Pugsley

Dan Pugsley is a sound designer creating audio for anything & everything and runs Cassini Sound, a boutique audio post production company.