2019-06-22 Devlog

Small update today with some adjustments to research timing and fixes for end-game bugs that I probably should've spotted sooner.

I've been looking at a bunch more research stuff that's not enabled yet - bee efficiency upgrades and advanced building variants. Not sure when that'll be ready to make it into a build, but providing multiple paths to hive productivity/efficiency/health that go beyond just expanding makes the game feel a lot more interesting.

Full changelog:

Increase duration of barracks, honey, and jelly refinery research
Fixed queen not dying (for real this time)
Fixed tutorials being shown when starting a new hive with a new queen
Fixed research being reset when starting a new hive with a new queen
Load shortcut (L) now loads most recent save instead of oldest save

2019-06-18 Devlog

Buzz buzz!

Today's update focuses primarily on bringing icons into effect, activity and event descriptions. These are still a work-in-progress, particularly in the case of activity and effect detail pop-ups, which are a little too small to comfortably hold all the information they need to display.

There are also a couple of crash fixes related to specific event outcomes.

Full changelog:

Added small role icons
Added red colouring to negative effect/activity values
Added icons to replace resource and bee role text in effects
Added activity indicators for role_swap, lifespam_multiplier, lifespan_offset, death_multiplier, stock_multiplier, stock_offset, and stock_swap
Added icons to stock_multiplier, stock_offset, stock_swap, lifespan_multiplier, lifespan_offset, destroy_cells, destroy_cell_type, destroy_cells_multiplier, death_multiplier, and role_swap activity details
Added icons to Throne Room, Wax Assembler, Honey Refinery, and Jelly Refinery info events
Added more detail to hive destruction activity indicators
Fixed typo in game load error event
Fixed queens never dying
Fixed crash when the last of a role-specific building type is destroyed
Fixed crash when the buildings of a particular type are destroyed
Fixed effect indicators for offsets showing * instead of +
Fixed load and save menus not working when save folder doesn't exist
Removed placeholder effects from cold effect
Updated click-off-able area for research menu to be smaller
Updated workshop info description
Activity indicators that aren't attached to a cell now close when clicked
Temporarily activity details icons into fake columns
Temporarily removed click to zoom/click to close text from activity details
Changed activity, effect, and event details to RichTextLabel
Disabled processing for cells with a value less than empty (increases performance for small hives)

2019-06-16 Devlog

Hey, friends

Finally managed to squeeze out a first pass on the research system. In this iteration, only nurseries, workshops, wax assemblers, exits, nectar storage, and pollen storage cells are able to be built at the start of the game. Further construction options are unlocked from the Research Menu at a Workshop. Builders are needed to progress research, which gives them a critical role in the growth of a hive that they previously didn't have.

At the moment, there aren't any research dependencies. I'll need to implement something for later research options I have planned, but for now, the ones that are in the game right now can be researched in any order.

This makes some dramatic changes to the feel of the game's pacing, but from the testing I've done so far, don't end up slowing down the game much. The key benefits here are reducing the initial construction options down to a less overwhelming 6 options, giving players control over the order in which things become available, and giving some persistent rewards to spend resources on.

I suspect that having to balance production and research will lead players to more directly manage the paused/unpaused state of assemblers and refineries, which I definitely want to encourage early on, but does get a bit cumbersome in the mid to late game. I have plans for some research options that will provide some alternative production management options better suited to scale to the places where pausing/unpausing doesn't quite cover, but I think I'll let the research system sit for a while and see how it feels/what kind of feedback I get before implementing those.

Obstacles and bonuses will probably be the next big feature to come in, which should shake up hive layouts and construction prioritisation in interesting ways.

Full changelog:

Added research menu to workshop
Added initial research costs for map room, barracks, honey refinery, jelly refinery, wax storage, honey storage, and jelly storage
Fixed possible crash during auto saves caused by lost bees outside of the hive
Fixed possible crash when loading older saves
Fixed tutorials not being shown
Fixed Escape not closing population menu
Fixed possible crash when switching roles for existing bees
Fixed bee animation and attachment nodes being duplicated unnecessarily
Removed vestigial code related to old construction and population menus
Refactored radial construction menus
Builders now conduct research

2019-06-12 Devlog

Hello bee friends!

Apologies for the slight gap in updates. Some unfortunate news sapped my motivation for a few days, but I'm back now with some good forward progress on a couple of fronts.

Firstly, I think I've knocked some crashes on the head relating to bees who don't return to the hive correctly. When autosaving, it was possible for these bees to put bad data into the save file that would crash the game on load, or crash during the save process. With autosaves enabled, this meant the game was likely to sew the seeds for its self destruction one way or another after 20 minutes of play time. Good times! I still haven't quite managed to track down the cause of bees not returning to the hive correctly, but I do have some ideas (and addressed one of those in this patch). In the meantime, these fixes make that less fatal!

Secondly, after some false starts, we have some new bee poses (single frame animations - eventually these will be expanded to be more interesting, but for now, it's just indicative of where animations will occur). The Queen now sits upright in her throne, and bees tuck their wings away when they don't have far to travel or when stopping at a cell, hopefully giving a visual impression of walking vs flying.

Last but not least, there are vignette and info graphics for the Throne room, which hint at an upcoming feature that I've had planned for a while.

I had hoped to ship this update on the 10th of June, which is when people in my particular corner of the world choose to celebrate the Queen of England's birthday. It is, of course, not the Queen's birthday at all, and in Australia alone, it's celebrated on three separate dates in different months, depending on which state you're in. Canada celebrates Fête de la Reine on the 25th of May, which was apparently Queen Victoria's birthday, so that at least makes sense.

I'll be the first person to admit that the colonial heritage that we put so much effort into celebrating should instead be commiserated, but in this rare case, I was happy to lean into it and reference this silliness.

Enjoy!

Full changelog:

Added initial Queen sitting pose
Added bee wing poses for fast and slow movement
Added playtime to save games (not user-visible)
Added Throne info image
Added Throne vignette image
Added new throne (chair)
Fixed DOF not updating during menu transition
Fixed foragers not returning to hive properly
Fixed pause timing sometimes resulting in an unwanted game frame when transitioning to/from the menu
Fixed possible crash when bees get lost
Fixed possible crash caused when loading bees that didn't return to the hive interior properly
Tweeked Queen pop in/out size in construction mode
Reworked bee initialisation to not require setting up area and bone attachment nodes
Upgraded save and load log messages to errors to force log flush

2019-06-08 Devlog

Helloooooooo beeeeeeeeeeee friendssssssssss

Today's update includes a few bits of menu polish as well as some bug fixes.

There are now configuration options for antialiasing and depth of field, so you can make the game look more/less fancy now depending on what youre computer is up for.

That old "bees coming up through the floor" problem - any bee who is outside the hive should now return to the exit they left via regardless of their role or previous activity. Yay.

A previous update broke events and vignettes (and I'd been playing with them off for a few days). Those are restored now.

Unfortunately, fixes to bee behaviour over the past couple of patches have likely broken the little happy spin that they used to sometimes do. I'll be adding that back in later, but rest assured, they'll be back to their spinny selves before the game is finished.

Full changelog:

Added in-game camera zoom to transition from/to menu
Added exit info image
Added exit vignette image
Added anti aliasing setting
Added depth of field setting
Added a new bee name
Fixed events and tutorials firing during menu transitions
Fixed bees not returning to the hive via the exit they left when their target priority changes
Fixed transition weirdness being caused when mashing Escape during menu transitions
Fixed events and vignettes not triggering
Refactored settings UI generation code

2019-06-06 Devlog

Attention hive friends! Another menu focused update today, though I've also added fixes for a bunch of issues during gameplay.

The star (or hexagon) of today's update is the cool new transition from the menu into the game and back again. It does have one significant bug at the moment that I didn't get wrapped up before I finished up work for the day - events and tutorials can trigger while a menu transition is happening. This isn't a problem when going from the menu into the game, but when going the other way, it can result in an event on top of the menu, and that's not ideal (pressing Escape a few times should clear it).

Full changelog:

Added info graphic for grid tiles
Added cool transition from/to menu
Added scrollbars to load screen
Added scrollbars to save screen
Added scrollbars to settings screen
Fixed bees interrupted when outside the hive not turning to face their destinations until they next bumble
Fixed possible crash when determining production priority
Fixed cells receiving click events when closing the population screen
Fixed Escape not closing radial menus
Fixed radial menus not repositioning when window dimensions are changed
Entering inspection mode now closes radial menus

2019-06-05 Devlog

Buzz buzz!

A small update that fixes a crash when pausing production of a Wax Assembler that has bees working on it. This update also fixes the autosave setting not saving properly and defaulting to false. You will need to manually enable it if you have run a previous build.

Full Changelog:

Added options for skipping tutorials, events and vignettes to settings screen
Added button for opening user folder to settings screen
Added graphics for map room, nursery, workshop and barracks info screens
Added note mentioning bees spawning at a fixed rate to population growth tutorial
Fixed title for exit info screen
Fixed possible crash when pausing production on a wax assembler
Fixed autosave setting not applying
Fixed autosave defaulting to false on first launch (will need to be enabled manually for all existing installs)
Refactored some menu code

2019-06-04 Devlog

Hi friends!

Small UI focused update today, this time adding "activity icons" that allow you to zoom to active vignettes or locations of recent events (not sure where Old Bitey got your hive? Now you can jump straight there). There are a few othe less visible fixes for input handling and menu related stuff as well.

Full Changelog:

Added activity indicators for active vignettes and hive destruction events
Added vignette activity icon
Added Escape as a shortcut for Resume in the main menu
Added Enter as a shortcut for closing/selecting affirmative action in tutorials/events/vignettes
Fixed activity and effect icons responding to mouse over during events
Fixed activity and effect icons responding to mouse over while radial menus are active
Fixed activity and effect details lingering while main menu is active
Fixed main menu items responding to mouse over events while tiles are flipping
Fixed magnify gesture events not marking input as handled
Fixed the main menu not pausing the game correctly
Fixed cancelling an event not marking input as handled
Fixed capitalisation of Throne Room when getting cell name
Repositioned version number
Viewing a vignette automatically removes activity icon
Removed some vestigial code from the old UI

2019-06-03 Devlog

Super quick update this morning that addresses potential crashes when starting the game with the fullscreen setting enabled and when visiting the load screen with no saved games.

Full changelog:

Deferred applying existing fullscreen settings at startup
Deferred applying autosave settings at startup
Fixed get_saved_games_list() not returning an empty array on error

2019-06-02 Devlog

Hello, friends!

Another primarily menu focused update today, adding options for saving/loading multiple save files, as well as persistent settings for fullscreen and autosaving (S now triggers an autosave). There are also a couple of fixes for some bugs when deleting under-construction multicell buildings, and a new crown for the Queen. How nice.

Full changelog:

Added new crown for Queens
Added initial pass on save and load screens
Added autosaving (10 minute increments)
Added tracking of current save name
Added modified date sorting to save file list
Added current menu item indicator
Added initial pass on setting screen
Added persistent user settings (user://config.cfg)
Fixed zero duration tweens when loading bee movement
Fixed Directory objects not being closed correctly when reading save file list
Fixed problems with deleting under-construction multicell buildings
Fixed problems with mouse over for under-contrstruction multicell buildings
Fixed birth ratios not being reset when starting a new hive

2019-06-01 Devlog

Greetings, hive friends!

Over the past week or so, I took a break from Hive Time to work on a side-project. As part of a talk I gave last week on making games in Godot, I needed a small example project to do a code walkthrough of. Hive Time is a little too big/sprawling/hastily made, so I quickly knocked together Honeycomb CRUNCH, a top-scrolling avoid-the-obstacles game that I've released for free (costs no money), and for Free (released under Free Software/open culture licences). If it sounds like your kind of thing, you can check it out over here.

With Honeycomb CRUNCH now savely stowed away in the Released Games basket, I spent today and yesterday getting the new main menu behaving. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but it's starting to shape up well, I think! At the moment, the settings menu doesn't do anything, and the load/save menus just automatically load/save the most recent/current hives as the previous S and L shortcuts did.

This build also brings in new animations for the Jelly Refinery, and reposition them. If you've got a save with a Jelly Refinery in it, you'll notice that its position is a bit weird.

Other than that, there are a few crash fixes, and Escape will now close radial menus/close or select the negative option of events. Escape will also bring up the main menu again. Good times.

Hooking up the rest of the menu systems is probably going to be slow work without much in the way of visible/exciting gameplay progress, but once that's all in place, we should return to the kind of update cadence we had before last week.

I've also made the store page public (with builds not available), which should make it easier to share/follow the project as it moves forward. Controls and known issues are now listed in the download instructions page. It doesn't look super fancy at the moment, but I'll be updating it to be more exciting in the future ^_^

Full changelog:

Added main menu
Added credits screen
Added Escape as a shortcut for closing radial menus
Added Escape as a shortcut for closing/chosing negative response in tutorials/events/vignettes
Added Escape as a shortcut for returning to the main menu
Added event images for save/load success
Added pop to radial menu buttons
Added cell indicator highlight sprite to radial menu build costs pop up
Added jelly refinery animations
Updated jelly refinery cell layout to put 'origin' cell in the 'middle'
Reordered player/game initialisation to better fit with new main menu behaviour
Reordered GUI scenes
Inventory fluff is now set based on bee activity
Fixed save file not being closed when saving
Fixed possible crash when stopping factory stop animation
Fixed game load crash when bee inventory fluff is not present
Fixed bee names are not being exhausted before being reused
Fixed bees bees diving into exits (happens 1 in 20 times now)