settings 2023-05-02 03:51
Fantastic name, fantastic visuals, fantastic audio, fantastic gameplay. One little thing: the "quantity" of bees wasn't updating here at the store. Mas nem pega nada, bom demais
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Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Honey BZZZness
By kazuo256, makiyoshi, Borabee, Rattman, eronsh, Luciano Leao and fluoretos
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 663 | 3.50 | 21 | |
| Fun | 869 | 3.10 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 865 | 3.02 | 21 | |
| Theme | 1144 | 2.94 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 400 | 3.97 | 21 | |
| Audio | 178 | 3.91 | 20 | |
| Humor | 784 | 2.75 | 20 | |
| Mood | 690 | 3.41 | 20 |
Fantastic name, fantastic visuals, fantastic audio, fantastic gameplay. One little thing: the "quantity" of bees wasn't updating here at the store. Mas nem pega nada, bom demais
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I enjoyed the chill relaxing nature of the game. The visuals are very pretty and it's good for what it's supposed to be.
Took me a little bit to figure out what to do, i was confused what to click on to do what. (anything, click ANYTHING), didn't realize you could click and drag the window either, so I was being attacked for a while and didn't know (doesn't seem to do anything to you though?). Also defaulted to a weird thin screen but it did let me maximize it.
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.
This is an awesome take on a clicker game. I love the visual style, the tech tree, and the music. "Flight of the Bumblebee" was a great choice for the music. I think I made too many worker bees, because they turned all my honey into jelly before I could spend it on upgrades!
beautiful game with nice soundtrack. Could improve some things to add quality of life improvment and more progression. But it's a really nice entry for this jam. Good job.
Really fun little game ^^ The art style is very beautiful An auto clicker is your best friend here, but very charming and relaxing experience, well done!
This bee on the motorcycle made me laugh. Cool bumblebee flight remix. Couldn't figure out how to make honeycombs :( Nice entry!
It took me some time to figure out that I could scroll to the right. That also made it hard to understand why my bees were disappearing.
However the game was quite fun. The graphics and sound are really great. Nice work!
Nice polished incremental game! The art is pretty cute and the music is enjoyable to listen to. The mechanics are a bit overwhelming as there are 3 resource types and lots of types of bees, so it's unclear what the best choices are. I think some extra sound effects could have helped make things more satisfying. Great game for the jam!
Well, to be honest i lost a count of time when starts to play, and after an hour i realised that`i was clicking all the time...
Really cool and very polished for a jam game ! It feels like we could play it for hours, good job :slight_smile:
I played this game for quite a while, both on my phone and later on my computer. I have some thoughts about the game progression.
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.
This game is a gem!
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!
On my pixel 6, all the text was very small so it was hard to figure out what was happening. Love the music, though!
I couldn't quite get to the royal jelly phase as my wrist started hurting, but the level of polish on this is really good. Bee puns very appreciated.
Loved the art ! 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 :)