Hi friends!
Tiny update today with a couple of small misc fixes.
Enjoy!
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Hi friends!
Apologies for the delay in updates. I've been away attending a farewell for a studio I worked with, which recently shut down development. Defiant were a beacon of inspiration for much of the Australian game dev industry and beyond. The company's values and priorities made me always happy to support them where ever I could.
While sitting in airports/flying, I did some work on getting a "Cells" screen put together (accessible via the Workshop), which shows a tally of all cells that are currently a part of the hive. This should make doing the mental maths for some of the cell/population ratios a bit easier.
I also made a start on colouring some of the HUD values red when things need attention (eg: when a role population is beyond capacity). The behaviour of this will change over time, but it's a step towards some important feedback that I've had planned for a long time. Huzzah!
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Buzz buzz!
Super small update today with a coupld of misc tweaks.
Exhibiting at MakerX went well for the most part, barring some initial technical hurdles that turned out to be temp warnings causing my CPU to be throttled back, making the game run very poorly (and potentially risking damage to my hardware). After doing some open computer surgery and re-seating a few bits and pieces, everything came right.
The tutorial seemed to point people in the right direction, and short of a couple of very young kids who maybe weren't up to reading them, I didn't really need to offer anybody help or guideance.
Of the three games I exhibited, Hive Time was definitely the most popular, with some people coming back to queue/play again/watch other people play. You can read some more reflections on the event over here.
Enjoy!
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Hi friends!
Quick music update today, which brings in a music track for the vinehopper science chain, and menu music! Here are some thoughts from Peter, which highlight that the vinehopper science chain's music has its origins way back in May, shortly after we first started talking about collaborating.
"Two new pieces today, both of which will probably be extended before too long, but we wanted to get these versions into the game. Firstly new event music in Bee March of Bee Progress (I'm not very good at bee wordplay) for our science experiment type events. This one is actually based on the very first made for this project, but it didn't quite have a home until now. A little minimalism influenced and layered, this is also the first use of an electronic instrument in the soundtrack. Bee Menu which... will probably get a better name has a very slow build, so that retreating back into the menu for brief pauses and so on isn't too jarring, but settles in to a chilled out groove based on the 'queen' motif that has featured in Beeginnings and various others."
I've been itching to have some music behind the main menu, but it didn't really make sense to chase that until we had a good feel for the game's musical identity - it's both great to finally fill that void and to be at a point where we can fill it. I love this one to pieces, and I feel like it's a great introduction to the game.
Speaking of introducing the game, I'm taking Hive Time (and a couple of other games) to a (nearly) local event called MakerX. I'm looking for the opportunity to practice pitching Hive Time and watch some more fresh players discover the game for the first time :)
Enjoy!
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Hark! An update!
The big star of today's update is diagetic/environmental audio. At the moment, these present as buzzing sounds for individual bees and outdoor birds/crickets/etc. that become louder as you zoom out away from the hive. There's a missing middle layer in between that I want to add where individual bees are less prominent and the buzzing of the hive as a whole becomes the focus, but that's something I'll experiment with in future builds.
I've bumped into some bottlenecks where if the game has too many 3D sound emitter nodes moving around at once, Godot's audio server will start stuttering and not recover until the game's restarted. For this reason, I've set a cap on how many individual bee sounds can be active at a time (currently capped at 50), and rather than destroying/creating them whenever a bee is spawned, they now come from/return to a pool of available emitters. I have no idea how much this will affect performance on low end systems, but setting bee volume to zero will disable all bee sound emitters - let me know if you feel you need to do that!
There are also a bunch of other miscellaneous fixes hiding in today's update as well.
Enjoy!
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Cheese plays Hive Time and works on some bug fixes on Twitch.tv.
Hi hi!
Quick update to fix a possible crash when upgrading storage cells (spotted during today's dev stream). Also resolves vignettes not displaying when events are disabled, and restores the placeholder Hexo event images that git misplaced during some folder restructuring a little while back.
Enjoy!
Full changelog:
Fixed vignettes not showing when events are disabled
Fixed upgraded storage cells sometimes triggering a crash
Moved some event images into sprites/events
Hi hive friends!
Today's update breaks a half-week-long drought with a bunch of new stuff!
Most notably, a Defence screen has been added (accessible from the Barracks), which gives an overview of the hive's defences - namely, barracks coverage, and how recently Defenders patrolled areas/individual cells. This is a first pass, and I suspect the presentation will at least change a little to allow everything to be a touch more readable, but for now, defended/undefended cells affect the types of events that will be shown. For example, if wasps attack and all nectar storage cells are defended, then Defender bees will be free to protect the hive's population without any loss in resources, but if there are undefended nectar storage cells, then the choice between saving resources and saving bees is presented as before (providing you actually have some Defenders!).
The next biggest thing is a bunch of optimisation work. I hadn't intended to do a proper optimisation pass, but while taking breaks to consider the Defence screen's implementation, I found myself addressing some low hanging fruit. Bee AI and cell processing in particular have dropped dramatically, which should improve performance on low end systems that may previously have been hitting CPU bottlenecks. I've also added an option in the settings menu for disabling shadows, which removes what is probably the most significant rendering overhead (at the cost of making the game less pretty, but I figure that's a good option to have for people who may not have access to computers that are as fast as the rest of us). There are still some optimisation stones I haven't yet turned over - there may be more camera/environment settings that aren't relevant to Hive Time that I can disable, and Godot has a MultiMesh class that apparently improves the performance of rendering identical 3D models (such as, say cells!).
Another change (or fix) involves adjustments to bee efficiency. Internally, Worker bees have an efficiency of 1, and the specialised roles have an efficiency of 2 (leaving room for possible research options to further increase efficiency if I end up adding them). Efficiency is generally used in bee activities to affect how our little friends go about doing things. In a refactor of some bee related stuff I did a while back, I inadvertently reset all bees' efficiency to 1. With that fixed, Foragers now gather (on average) twice as many resources as Workers and Builders now construct cells twice as fast as Workers. This shifts the dynamics of mid and late game resource gathering and hive expansion a whole bunch - a good population of Foragers can now support multiple honey refineries, and that (combined with the recent changes to reduce production wastage) opens up another viable strategy to pursue in the mid game.
Enjoy!
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Hive five o/
Today's update brings in (at long last) an updated Wax Assembler model that more closely matches other production facilities. The new Wax Assembler has animations as well, so it's now easier to tell when it's producing, when it's idle, or when production is explicitly paused.
I'd been holding off on updating the tutorial images since I knew I'd have to revisit them whenever I got around to making a new Wax Assembler. With that done, I've gone through and grabbed new screenshots, this time with 16x antialiasing so that they look nice and smooth. Along with the old Wax Assembler, the last vestigaes of the old Beesitter nurse hat and the temp GUI for the population menu are now gone for good.
Additionally, I've popped in a button for resetting user settings to default, and an option to hide the game HUD (this doesn't affect radial menus, events/tutorials/vignettes, or the screens accessed by clicking on cells like the Population screen and the Research screen).
Enjoy!
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Buzz buzz!
Today's update brings in a bunch of misc fixes - me cleaning up some old todo items spread scross the codebase while working on bigger features. Most of these are cosmetic and increase the readabiltiy or visibility of important things (such as an effect to draw more attention to new effect and activity indicators, or underlines for the research category tab buttons to make their purpose more readable).
There are also few possible crashes that I've addressed, and a debug key for finishing (or at least adding 99999 progress) research that I've added.
Enjoy!
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Hey hive friends!
Super small update today to fix a couple of bugs highlighted during a recent stream. The big one is a proper resolution to the lingering issue of vertical keyboard panning (turns out I'd accidentally applied it to the wrong axis, causing the camera to move closer to the hive and eventually clip into it).
Previous fixes attempting to address this were still changes that needed to be made in order to resolve the problem properly, but since the issue was half as pronounced after that, it was easy to get the initial impression that it was resolved. That's game dev for you!
Enjoy!
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Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
As a belated birthday activity, I just spent a few days away at Cradle Mountain, Tasmania. A bit cold for any bees, but still lovely nonetheless. In addition to trapsing around the damp wilderness, hanging out with cool animals, and recording audio for one of my other projects, I also found some time to get a bit of Hive Time work done.
I'd intended to spend an evening writing some new events and doing a writing pass on existing events, but I ended up writing a bunch of event condition and effect handling code (including some stuff that I thought I'd written and had totally forgotten - whoops :D ).
Peter's also sent through an updated piece of music that's included in this update.
Enjoy!
Full changelog:
Hi hi hi hi!
The big change in todays update is additional checks for workers before they start production. Previously, if resource levels were below capacity, workers would rush to start producing more regardless of whether another worker was already producing enough to fill that resource up to storage capacity. Since 9 bees can work any given production facility at a time, that was resulting in up to 179 honey being wasted when filling up jelly stores (not to mention pollen and nectar).
This fix should have a pretty dramatic impact on resource dynamics, particularly how many foragers it takes to keep up with production in the mid to late game.
Today's update also adds a couple of new event music tracks from Peter, one for when your last Queen dies, and another for when those slug outlaws come to visit.
Enjoy!
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Buzz buzz buzz!
A bunch of minor fixes and some refactoring in today's update, primarily focused on refactoring the handling of cell construction and destruction. Population and storage values should update correctly when deleting upgraded cells, and rewriting overgrown explicit casing for each cell type into a couple of generic checks means that adding new cell/upgrade types is a bunch less work for me moving forward as well.
Enjoy!
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Buzz buzz!
Today's update adds a bunch of UI tweaks that hopefully help make a few things readable that were previously... less readable.
The biggest addition is a transparent preview of construction options that appears in blue or red before building depending on whether there's enough space and resources available. This should help communicate the space required to build in ways that the cell indicators next to the cost indicators didn't seem to be doing.
Previously unseen research options and research options that have recently been completed now blink until you mouse over them. This makes it easier to remember what you've just researched and makes newly unlocked options more visible.
There's also a new debug dialog for triggering events. Previously, pressing E would reduce the event timer to zero and trigger the next queued event. Now, pressing E will bring up the event selection dialog, with the next queued event selected. This dialog allows specific events to be previewed and triggered. It's mostly to help me with debugging/testing new events and keeping track of which ones have images, but it will also help KestrelPi when testing event-specific music cues (if we put them in).
Enjoy!
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