Honey BZZZness by kazuo256
PLAY IN BROWSER
In Honey BZZZness, you are a queen bee desperate for that sweet, sweet royal jelly. You simply can't do without it! But to sate your royal hunger, you must manage your hive just the right way to increase honey production as much as possible, while avoiding the threat of predators who wish to harm your loyal subjects or steal the sweet delicacy they produce. Once your subjects have enough honey, they will make it into the royal jelly you so desire, and deliver it right to your throne room.
This game was designed for mobile! Download the APK and give it a try on your Android device!
Patch 1.0.1
- Fix all missing sound effects
- Fix soundtrack mixing
- Fix BeeFy attacking animation
Ratings
| Given | 15🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
Overall pretty nice, loved the graphics and sound, the tech tree was literally over in seconds so it could have used some tuning there, and getting more bees didn't really accomplish much more over just clicking but it was fun to watch them buzz around.
The art style is very beautiful
An auto clicker is your best friend here, but very charming and relaxing experience, well done!
Nice entry!
However the game was quite fun. The graphics and sound are really great. Nice work!
So I was very excited to see that this is primarily a phone game. I don't often play phone games due to the number of games with ads, etc, so whenever somebody makes a phone game for Ludum Dare it seems like a great opportunity to try a phone game. So the first time I played this game was on my phone.
However, I feel like progress in this game just plateaus pretty quickly once all the upgrades are unlocked. In particular, it seems like I can just barely earn enough honey to fend off all the enemies and maybe buy some bees. But it is very very difficult to actually grow the hive any bigger, because by the time I've earned any amount of honey and built some new bees, a new threat shows up and I have to spend forever dealing with that.
I think this is partially because I misunderstood the mechanics. I thought that the "threat" was responsible for basically killing all my bees, but now I am under the impression that the bees just naturally leave at some point. Either way, the mechanic I wish to complain about is the bees leaving at a regular interval.
This is because, at least on mobile, it is actually extremely physically strenuous to earn enough honey to spawn a meaningful population of bees in the hive. The fact that all the bees have to be bought over and over just to have a hive at all makes this game really really hard to play on phone, as you just have to keep tapping over and over, and this becomes physically very difficult.
I think a traditional clicker game would have some way to earn resources over time, namely, honey. But I couldn't figure out any strategy that earns significant amounts of honey over time. It seems like there are strategies that will earn honey somewhat slowly, but I can't imagine that the total honey earned over the lifetime of the bees will be enough to re-spawn all of them once they all leave.
So, I think my suggestion would be to make some permanent upgrades that help you earn honey/sec or similar. Because although it is physically strenuous to tap the screen so much, I actually had a lot of fun tapping the screen right at the beginning of the game, when it helped me build up some initial skills in the skill tree. I think that having a clicker component to the game is perfectly fine, because it is fun to do clicking, as long as you can take breaks -- there just needs to be a way to make progress in the game without that mandated constant clicking.
One point of confusion for me is I can't tell if there is a way to actually win. After deciding that the game was simply too hard on my fingers, I decided to try the Windows version with an autoclicker. This went much better, overall, as I didn't have to strain my fingers tapping. But, I still was not able to win, even with some bee setups that produced some honey over time.
As a final resort, I tried hacking the honey value in my save file to 100,000, as well as searching through the source code for instances of "jelly" and "royal" and "win." I can't figure out if there is an actual win condition. I think it might be good to clarify this just on the Ludum Dare page, as it definitely sounds like it's possible to win based on the current description.
(As a side note, the fact that you have save files here is really cool! That's one of those features that's difficult to implement but can make a huge quality-of-life difference sometimes, especially in the Ludum Dare setting).
So, now that I've talked about the gameplay, some other notes: I think the graphics in this game are great, everything worked well on mobile and computer (although some things are a little tiny on my phone). The music is great, Flight of the Bumblebee is a fun choice for the threat music. And of course bee puns are always greatly appreciated.
Overall, lots of great polish here in terms of sounds, graphics, save files, and e.g. the skill system. It's just difficult to play this game for a long run, due to the amount of tapping required.
However, I have to agree with the person above me about the difficulty. I just set up an AHK script eventually! Further skill tree upgrades could be desirable.
I wasn't able to reach the ending where I get the royal jelly, as it describes in the description. As a small note on bees, I believe royal jelly is only fed to larvae to make them queens, and not to the adult queen. Bees are fascinating creatures, so it could be fun to integrate more bee mechanics that harness their unique characteristics.
Graphics are gorgeous and fit the theme, the music was fun, and the level of polish was amazing. Well done!
Didn't notice the predators at first, since i was playing without sound, but they doesn't seem to do anything to us ?
Nice entry though :)