I liked the painterly styled graphics, but had problems understanding the gameplay; I think the appearance of wasps may have been bugged, as sometimes I would see a flicker of a sprite...?
Played through a few times, but each time I lost all bees except for those working on the middle assignment, and was unsure what I needed to do to gain new bees

@mrnyarlathotep: Thanks for the feedback!

I think I did a really bad job at making things intuitive ... basically how it works is:

the left assignment is the one where the bees feed, so you can get more of them, but if you don't have enough food/honey, then they will starve.

The ones on the right are guarding and also consume some food and will starve if there isn't enough.
The ones in the middle are gathering and instead of consuming they will give you more food and materials to upgrade.

The wasps are more of an event that shows up where you can see the next weather changes, once their countdown is complete, you either have enough guards not to lose anything, or you lose some bees and honey.


Those flickering sprites are probably some bug due to me spawning the bees first and then moving them to their assignment and the engine doing some kind or interpolation of the position maybe ...

This is a clever idea for a game, although I had to keep referring to you comment for what to do!! The music is a perfect fit, and at no point got annoying (I'm still humming it in fact!) and the game is really nice and relaxing to play, although it does seem really difficult and I had to keep restarting! If there was a 'restart' button that would help, and maybe starting with more honey so you can start making new bee straight away that would make things a little easier. All in, a really nice game, well done! :smiley:

Took me a few tries to get going. The concept is really fun, the balance just needs some work. I think it'd be really fun if you eventually start adding more of each assignment until you have this whole big busy hive going. The atmosphere with the music and art is really nice, too! Great job!

Too bad there is no ending, the concept is cool and bees universe is original.

Like the music! I couldn't get my hive to start up. The core mechanic is solid and potentially a lot of fun, If you polish the communication with the player a bit you could really get it to shine! Something like:

- Remove the 'max bees' indicator; I thought 30 bees didn't like me enough to come help. :'( snif.
- Get rid of the actually assigned vs available bees. At least early on the 'quota' mechanic didn't seem to add anything and made the game a little harder to understand. Just have idle bees rotate in a standby pattern above the hive.
- Communicate bee death, and why they die. Like have them drop upside down on the hive for a bit, cute argh sound, that kind of thing.
- Perhaps also add different bee appearance for each role, just a an extra hint what each hive entrance does. Little helmet on the guards, carry little jars of honey, that sort of thing.
- Same with the weather. Make them sweat, look tired, something that shows the player what the effect of weather is.
- What is the hexagon icon? Number of larvae? Maybe just display this on the hive itself by adding extra hexagons.

There's a lot of potential here. Keep at it!

Oops, double post. Sorry!

Great job, it's a nice concept and bees are cool :)

At first i didn't really understand what i was supposed to do but after going to the comments i got the hang of it a bit. Maybe some in game explanation would help?

But this is a very happy and cute game and the idea is quite original and as well!
The music was funny and fit perfectly.
The weather changes were a good addition too.

Well done!

It took a few tries to figure this one out. For those having trouble:

- Start out assigning the max # of bees to the gathering (middle) task. Don't assign anyone to the other tasks just yet, they'll just eat up all the food you're producing and starve.
- Unassigned bees and bees assigned to gathering do not consume food. This is very important for managing your food supply.
- Once you have a good supply of food (a few dozen), assign one bee to the feed (left) task.
- Upgrade your gathering and keep assigning bees there. Always keep upgrading this and keep the max # of bees assigned there.
- Assign bees to feed (and upgrade as necessary) as you start to notice that you are building a surplus of food.
- In bad weather, you may need to cut your feed assignment by up to half to cope with the decreased production of food.
- If you follow these steps, you will soon have more bees than you know what to do with.
- You only need to worry about guards when there are wasps in the forecast. Since guards consume food, it is best to leave this empty at all other times. I didn't even need to upgrade my guard station.
- When the wasps are coming, just assign wasp level +1 bees to the guard (right) task.

Once I got the hang of this, it was actually pretty fun. Some suggestions:
- Have the wasp attacks start occurring far earlier . As noted above, I barely ever needed guards.
- Give the player a reason to keep a standing army of guards. Maybe make experienced guards be more effective somehow.
- Since feeding is upgraded less often than gathering, it should cost more so that the cost of leveling it does not become trivial.
- Let the player continue playing after winning

Took a little bit of reading comments until I figured out what was going on, it would have been nice to label each part of the hive, because without its difficult to figure out what is what.

Graphics were very nice, and it was fairly relaxing to manage my hive when it got going

@daanvanyperen, @smiling-cat-entertainment: I wish I could give extra :heart: for your comments.

While I figured that there were issues when it comes to communicating what is happening and balancing everything, I do have trouble pinpointing where exactly the problems come from and what should be changed to avoid them. I hope I will find the time to fix them at some point.

Also thanks to everyone else who left comments here. All this helpful feedback is what I like so much about ludum dare.

Well, I'm pretty confused after giving this several tries. There just isn't much feedback as to what is or isn't working. Reading through the comments now, I see Smiling Cat has pretty much locked things down. You should totally listen to everything he said.

You have a whole lot of screen and you're not using it for anything. How about putting the flowers there so I can watch my workers work rather than them moving off-screen? Oh, and your web build run is WAY to large of a window!

I liked the parallax background and you background music a lot!

Great but shortlived game. The graphics are nice and the music is relaxing. I had no clue what to do but after reading your first comment I got it. I survived my first wasp attack but then I somehow managed to get a negative bee count. I hope I stumble about a post compo version of this game at some point. :smiley:

is a really cool idea, i like the graphics but the game need some tutorials or better UI for explaining what is going on and what is each tool in the game! nice entry!

Cool hand painted graphics. They look good.
The background music was okay.
The gameplay is absoolutely not intuitive.
What was okay is the camera movement. Even tough you don't need it at this game. It gives it a good touch.

The web version fails to run on Linux running Chromium. The music plays (and I like the music!) but it perpetually says "Running..." with no game displayed.

@acotis That's weird ... Chromium on Linux was what I used for testing the Web version ...

For some reason the game seems really zoomed in and I can't zoom out to a reasonable level. It's annoying to have to scroll to one area to interact and then scroll to another just to see stats.
Firefox, windows 10.

Loved the relaxing music, and the painted style graphics are very nice.

Good game, enjoyed it quite a bit. A bit difficult at times but nonetheless, it worked!

I played the OS X version. The background flowers and gameplay perspective is engaging and well done. Hope you continue with this.

Good job, I think this game has a good opportunity to grow, the painting is beautiful! Many people like flowers and interacting with bees is a great idea!