Description

A game where you need to build up an army of bees and command them by waggling your butt! You win when you destroy the enemy hive. During playtesting, it took me about 18 minutes. Can you do better?

This is my second game jam, the game is built using Phaser (a js library) and Tiled. All sounds are using sfxr or recorded and the music is "Flight of the Bumblebee" of course. I didn't make the music but wouldn't mind getting graded on the other sounds.

Inside the hive:

Outside:

Detailed Controls / Gameplay / Strategy

This section is optional. It's only to help in case you get stuck.

At the start of the game you should focus on manually building up your army of bees. You fly upwards through the arrows on the ground to exit the hive, and downwards to re-enter. There is also a kind of magnetic assist for this.

Game uses WASD and arrow keys flying the bee around using tank controls, and E for all interactions. You can move backwards in the hive but not when you're flying. You fly out and collect pollen from a flower (you can only carry one) and re-enter the hive to feed the pollen to a larva, one at a time. After 3 feedings, a larva turns into a fellow bee, who will go out and randomly search for pollen for you, but also slack a lot! After a certain number of bees it becomes easier to start commanding them to move towards patches of flowers instead of manually collecting pollen. Pollen has a 30s cooldown, so alternating patches is ideal. Your bees will automatically attack enemy bees near them, so building up a lot of bees will also protect your larva. If you instead did nothing at the start of the game, for example, enemy bees would begin to enter your hive, kill larva, and you would lose.

During my playtest, I focused on scaling faster than the enemy bees first, overcoming their initial advantage. Some of the nearby bees would naturally die when they wandered too close. After feeling safe, I began to search for the enemy hives, and then commanded lots of my bees to attack that area. After a certain point, it's just hunting down the few stragglers.

Waggling Details

Optional section

You can only waggle inside the hive. Bees that aren't busy and are just hanging out in the hive will begin to pay attention to you when you waggle your butt (when you press left and right rapidly). They show attention with a ?. You can walk forwards while waggling (at least one key press every 0.75 seconds) and you should see an arrow appear along with a distance like "15m". This tells the bees what direction to go and how far. They will respond with ! and leave once you stop waggling. I recommend following them to see how they do, at least a few times. You can measure how far things are when you are outside the hive. Lots of enemy hives are around 50m away. It is a good idea to overshoot when assaulting enemy hives.

It's unintended but an easy way to do waggling is to realize that you can start waggling at any point even when there are no bees around. They'll still execute their orders even if they didn't see you start the waggle, so you can keep shaking as long as you need (without even moving) as more and more bees start to pay attention.

Cheats / Change Log

10/10/2024: Added the debug mode for everyone to use at: https://geoffreylhart.gitlab.io/zenithref/demos/ld56.html?debug

You can use +/- to zoom in or out in this mode, and use F to feed the larva without pollen, letting you summon tons of bees instantly. Also realized that there was no max framerate, which may have made the game unplayable for many. So I fixed that.