Beencremental

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,...

Summer Mechanics Are In!Last week, I finished implementing all the core mechanics that will revolve around Summer!One of the biggest additions is the Locusts, a new plague that will challenge the player during their foraging sessions. They'll make Summer a lot more dangerous, forcing you to think about how and when you gather pollen before your flowers—and your swarm—are overwhelmed.To fight back, you'll have the new Honeycomb ability, giving you a way to defend yourself against Locusts while also opening up some fun little interactions with already existing mechanics.I'm really excited to see how people end up interacting with all these new systems once they get their hands on them!Time to Balance!With all the pieces finally in place, it's time for one of my favorite parts of development:Playing the game over, and over, and over again.Now that Summer is becoming a much more complex system, there's a LOT of numbers to balance. From heat and hydration to Locusts, pollen, abilities, and everything in between, I'm going to spend the next few days trying to find that sweet spot where everything feels challenging without becoming frustrating.The new Summer section of the upgrade tree is also almost ready! I'll be working on that throughout this week, and hopefully I'll have some new Autumn content to share with you in the next update. ;)As always, I hope to see you around next week, or over on our Discord server! See you next week! 🐝 https://discord.gg/8SmVrYbrr

Summer development is in full steam! This week, I wanted to show you something a little different: how I go from a concept to an actual implemented feature, using one of the new Friendly Bugs from the Genetic Traits as an example. Meet the Water Dragonfly!The Water Dragonfly will be an important Friendly Bug during Summer, helping your swarm deal with one of the season's biggest challenges: keeping flowers hydrated. Summer's main mechanic is all about racing against heat waves and enemies to gather as much pollen as possible before it's too late. Flowers can dry out under the summer heat, but with the new Hydrate mechanic, you can bring them back to life and keep them producing pollen. At the beginning of the season, hydration will be a fairly scarce resource. Friendly Bugs like the Water Dragonfly can make managing it much easier, giving you a good reason to bring them along as part of your team. It Starts With a Concept Before I turn an idea into a task, it usually starts on a board where I pin down all the things floating around in my head. This is where I think about the gameplay feel, implications, and how I want a scene to play out as the player interacts with all of its elements. I already had a pretty good idea of the feeling I wanted Summer to have (I won't spoil too much!), so at this point I mainly had to ask myself: Does this idea fit the season? Is the bug's existence actually justified? Most importantly... is it fun? I can't really say how long an idea stays in this stage. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes everything just starts clicking into place one after another as the bigger picture becomes clearer.In the beginning, I didn't even know what kind of bug the Water Dragonfly would be. I only knew that I wanted something flying across the screen from left to right, doing something in quick successions. After a bit of research into what kind of bug could fit this behaviour, everything started to click! Building the Foundations Of course, I couldn't ...