My design philosophy was that if a player hasn't yet grokked the system, the continue-playing target shouldn't feel comfortably attainable, and if a player has, then it should feel easy in a way that reinforces and reflects that they've got a solid grip on what the game's doing. This turned out to be much simpler to implement than I had anticipated due to some unrelated work I'd previously done to provide speparation between individual bee lifespans and game-wide lifespans.įrom an expectation management perspective, I'm still worried that players will treat this as a difficulty slider with the default set to "normal" rather than see the two hour default as a limit that is tuned to be tight for a player who doesn't know what they're doing, but over three times the amount of time a player who's understood and mastered the game's mechanics will need. Alternate crowns/hats are just for everyday use, and so the Queen still wears the traditional crown in portraits, events, and vignettes (it might be nice to have variants for each hat for every event/vignette/portrait, but that's a mountain of work for very little benefit).Īnother item that's been sitting on my todo list for a long time is the addition of a "Queen lifespan" FYOF option. I'm really happy to finally get this in, as previously there was no way to see any of the alternative Queen hats without enabling the "Customise any bee" FYOF option, which ends up partially breaking the reward that special bees represent. Even more Huzzah is a new event that allows the Queen to pick a new hat/crown for her and her ancestors, which can trigger for any queen after the first. I've popped in a little paper crown and a jester hat, which makes Queen the role with the highest number of alternate hats. Not only does the Queen move now, but she also has new hats. If you find yourself not liking the new Queen animations, you can turn them off in the Video Settings menu. Now that she's not static, it looks even more odd that the current Queen remains seated when the Throne Room is being upgraded - especially when she's sitting cross-legged in mid air! To help there I've added a cute little scaffold throne, which is silly (as it should be) and gets the job done. ![]() ![]() This aligns with the development philosophy I've had from the beginning for Hive Time, which is to focus on doing as much with as little as possible while leaving room to expand and polish later if needed. In general I'm happy with how they've come out so far and I figure what's there now (like many other things in Hive Time) is a foundation that I can build on later if/when I'm able. Animtion is a skill that I feel like I've never really been able to invest any time in growing, so this work has been way outside my comfort zone. It was interesting to do though, and if you're interested, you can watch me doing some of it here. I've made a mix of "idle" and "action" animations to make sure that high energy animations are sprinkled among less-distracting low energy animations. The Queen now looks around, yawns, stretches, cleans her antennae and sometimes waves at the player.įinding the right balance of animation density has been tricky - it turns out that the moment there's some movement, any time where there isn't any movement immediately stands out. Lately I've been looking at submitting Hive Time for some awards, and while a static Queen might generally be fine for playing, it's not a great first impression from an assessment standpoint. ![]() It also has the side effect of lowering expectations slightly, which in turn makes other things like the research effect stand out a little more. Someone can have fun with it regardless of whether or not the Queen is specifically interesting. ![]() In terms of impact, a player will generally notice that she doesn't move when they start playing and then never think about it again, so while having time to do it would be nice, it didn't ever feel critical.Īnd that's fine in the context that Hive Time exists in for players. Other things always ended up being higher priority. Giving a bit more life to the Queen is something that's been on my todo list since before the end of the jam we initially prototyped Hive Time for. Today's patch adds some new Queen animations, a new "find your own fun" option for Queen lifespans, a button that opens reference URLs for Beepedia facts, and a bunch of other misc tweaks and fixes.
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