Beencremental

Hello everyone!Sorry for abruptly disappearing from my weekly devlogs, haha! Development has had a pretty tight grip on my attention lately, and I've been focusing on getting everything ready for the upcoming playtest.I really want to make sure the game is in the best shape possible before putting it in front of players, so I've spent some time working on a bunch of improvements and quality-of-life features.Among these, I've finally implemented proper controller support, something many of you have been asking for! I've also added some visibility improvements to make it easier to distinguish the Queen from the mouse cursor, along with plenty of other little QoL changes that I hope will make the overall experience much smoother.And while all of this was going on, I've also been going full throttle on Autumn's development! There's still plenty to do, but I'm excited about how things are coming together, and I'm hoping to share some proper progress on the new Season in the next update 👀Thanks for sticking around, and see you soon! 🐝As always, I hope to see you around next time, or over our Discord server!See you! 🐝https://discord.gg/BWdzXDxXG

Hello everyone!Quick dev update this week!I've finished balancing Summer! (finally 😭)After many, many hours of playtesting, tweaking numbers, breaking things, fixing them, and playing again, I've reached a point where I'm happy enough with the Summer experience to prepare an early playtest build of the game.I'm SO excited to see where this takes us and, more importantly, to see what happens when actual players get their hands on it!Meanwhile... Fall Is Falling!While the playtest build is coming together, I've spent the last couple of days prototyping the visual direction for Autumn.After trying out a few different ideas, I think I've finally landed on a look I'm really happy with!Now that I have a visual direction to work with, I'm hoping to start rolling out the actual gameplay features for Autumn soon, so no spoilers yet.A Very Secret Steam Page Update...And finally, here's a little spoiler for something that's been happening behind the scenes.The Steam capsule art is getting a proper makeover!I've been making the current capsule art myself, and while I think they're... serviceable... let's just say I think Beencremental deserves a professional touch.So I brought in an artist to take care of the new capsule art, and I'm really excited to see the final result!Here's a tiny WIP sneak peek at the new Queen Bee design:I hope you enjoy it! 🐝❤️That's all for this week!Things are starting to move pretty quickly now, with the first playtest build coming together and Autumn officially beginning development.As always, I hope to see you around next week, or over our Discord server!See you next week! 🐝https://discord.gg/8SmVrYbrr

Hello everyone!I'm excited to share another dev update! This time, most of my work has been focused on balancing the Summer Season, so I figured it would be nice to share a bit of the process behind it.Before Pulling Levers, You Have to Make ThemBefore I can start pulling levers and pushing buttons, I first have to make them!The past two Seasons have been developed using roughly the same process.I start with all my notes and task cards, breaking down the Season ahead into all the distinct elements and features I need to build.For Summer, some of these were:A new Swarm systemLocustsA Locust spawning systemHeat zonesFlower dry statesA hydration meterAnd many more little systems that connect everything togetherI then put their code and art in place, making sure each feature works as intended from start to finish, regardless of the actual values it will eventually use.For example, at this point I don't really care whether something has 10 HP or 100 HP, or whether it consumes 1 resource per second or 10. I just need to make sure the system itself works.It's also always at this stage that I realize just how much stuff I didn't think about during the brainstorming process.So, naturally, a couple of new tasks appear. Hehe. 😅Putting the Pieces TogetherOnce all the individual pieces are working, it's time to start setting them up on the board.This is where I build the level logic that connects everything together: how one system interacts with another, how mechanics affect each other, and how everything ultimately comes together into a playable experience.Once again, I keep the actual numbers separate from the systems themselves. The important variables are exposed in a central place where I can easily access and modify them whenever I need to.And this is going to be VERY useful for the next step.The Upgrade TreeEvery value or mechanic that can be changed through gameplay gets its own upgrade node on the tree.I lay these out in general areas, grouping them by theme, mechanic,...