This is really cute idea! I've been enjoying watching my hive grow on the desktop.. A couple of things:
- the toggle for honey/wax is really difficult to see and the tutorial wasn't very clear one where to look. I spent quite a long time in the bee/flower tabs trying to figure out where it was!
- after buying expansion sections with water in, the builder bees clear the rocks but no flowers seem to spawn? I couldn't place mud there either, so it means there's no real point building more hive cells out to the sides once it gets to that area.
- the colours for pollen and wax are quite similar when they're not side by side. It was hard to tell which upgrades required what.
I’m really happy to hear you’ve been enjoying it, thank you so much for the feedback.
You’re absolutely right about the UI/toggle side of things. I’m aware that part still needs work, and I want to make it much clearer and easier to read.
You’re also right about the side expansion areas. At the moment they don’t really offer enough reason to keep pushing outward, and I definitely want to support them with more content and mechanics over time. The water currently doesn’t have much real gameplay meaning yet either, but I do want to turn it into something more interesting later on instead of it just being background space.
If you have any ideas for what those side areas or the water could become, I’d genuinely love to hear them.
1. My monitor layout is stacked vertically and the bees appeared on my lower monitor. I would like to be able to set which monitor they colonize.
2. I couldn't figure out how to change the producer bee to make wax instead of honey. Clicking on it did nothing, and none of the menus were responsive any more once I got to that prompt.
3. The pixel art was a little blurry on my screen. It's a 1920x1200 display at 150% ui scale, so it's not unusual for things to be blurry, but for a pixel art game attached to screen width it'd be nice for it to integer scale to 1920 pixels
I loved the forestry mod for minecraft, so I'm always on the lookout for bee type games. I'm excited to see where this one goes!
Thanks a lot for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
I’ve already pushed a small update based on your comment. The monitor swap option is in the Settings panel at the bottom left, and I also improved the tutorial/producer interaction so the honey/beewax toggle should be much easier to find now.
I did some work on the pixel scaling side as well for different display setups. If you ever feel like checking it again, I’d be really curious to hear whether it feels better on your setup now.
Thanks again for taking the time to write all that out :)
I've loaded it up again, the monitor swap feature is appreciated!
Overscrutinizing it in paint.net, the sprite scaling is pretty good.
Text has blurry edges which drags everything down, but aside from that I'm only seeing some minor scaling mismatches and misalignments that probably aren't obvious unless you're zoomed way in on a screenshot like I am. The settings menu sliders and checkboxes are not pixels at all so I'm assuming that's just unfinished.
In this screenshot I can see that the menu tray buttons are at 2.75 scale or so, which gives inconsistent column widths (3, 3, 2, 3) and clashes with the 2x scale beneath them.
This flower isn't aligned to the pixel grid of the world. This is fine for moving things like the birds and leaves but for static elements you can notice it sometimes.
This Vial of honey on the right has the same issue as the tab buttons, it's at a non integer scale so with nearest neighbor it gets crunched a bit.
Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking the time to look this closely and point all of this out.
A lot of what you mentioned is fair. Some of the odd placement and alignment issues are probably tied to how the flower spawn system currently works, and some of the rougher visual inconsistencies are also me still being pretty inexperienced with pixel art. This is basically my first real project, and I’m building it solo, so I’m still learning as I go.
You’re also right about the UI side. Outside of the bee and upgrade sections, I haven’t really done a proper design pass on most of the UI yet, so a lot of it is there more for function than presentation right now.
Your comments are genuinely very helpful, and I’ll try to keep all of this in mind as I keep improving it. Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback :)
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This is really cute idea! I've been enjoying watching my hive grow on the desktop.. A couple of things:
- the toggle for honey/wax is really difficult to see and the tutorial wasn't very clear one where to look. I spent quite a long time in the bee/flower tabs trying to figure out where it was!
- after buying expansion sections with water in, the builder bees clear the rocks but no flowers seem to spawn? I couldn't place mud there either, so it means there's no real point building more hive cells out to the sides once it gets to that area.
- the colours for pollen and wax are quite similar when they're not side by side. It was hard to tell which upgrades required what.
Looking forward to seeing this project grow.
I’m really happy to hear you’ve been enjoying it, thank you so much for the feedback.
You’re absolutely right about the UI/toggle side of things. I’m aware that part still needs work, and I want to make it much clearer and easier to read.
You’re also right about the side expansion areas. At the moment they don’t really offer enough reason to keep pushing outward, and I definitely want to support them with more content and mechanics over time. The water currently doesn’t have much real gameplay meaning yet either, but I do want to turn it into something more interesting later on instead of it just being background space.
If you have any ideas for what those side areas or the water could become, I’d genuinely love to hear them.
Thanks again, comments like this really help.
Cool concept!
Feedback:
1. My monitor layout is stacked vertically and the bees appeared on my lower monitor. I would like to be able to set which monitor they colonize.
2. I couldn't figure out how to change the producer bee to make wax instead of honey. Clicking on it did nothing, and none of the menus were responsive any more once I got to that prompt.
3. The pixel art was a little blurry on my screen. It's a 1920x1200 display at 150% ui scale, so it's not unusual for things to be blurry, but for a pixel art game attached to screen width it'd be nice for it to integer scale to 1920 pixels
I loved the forestry mod for minecraft, so I'm always on the lookout for bee type games. I'm excited to see where this one goes!
Thanks a lot for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
I’ve already pushed a small update based on your comment. The monitor swap option is in the Settings panel at the bottom left, and I also improved the tutorial/producer interaction so the honey/beewax toggle should be much easier to find now.
I did some work on the pixel scaling side as well for different display setups. If you ever feel like checking it again, I’d be really curious to hear whether it feels better on your setup now.
Thanks again for taking the time to write all that out :)
I've loaded it up again, the monitor swap feature is appreciated!
Overscrutinizing it in paint.net, the sprite scaling is pretty good.
Text has blurry edges which drags everything down, but aside from that I'm only seeing some minor scaling mismatches and misalignments that probably aren't obvious unless you're zoomed way in on a screenshot like I am. The settings menu sliders and checkboxes are not pixels at all so I'm assuming that's just unfinished.
In this screenshot I can see that the menu tray buttons are at 2.75 scale or so, which gives inconsistent column widths (3, 3, 2, 3) and clashes with the 2x scale beneath them.
This flower isn't aligned to the pixel grid of the world. This is fine for moving things like the birds and leaves but for static elements you can notice it sometimes.
This Vial of honey on the right has the same issue as the tab buttons, it's at a non integer scale so with nearest neighbor it gets crunched a bit.
Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking the time to look this closely and point all of this out.
A lot of what you mentioned is fair. Some of the odd placement and alignment issues are probably tied to how the flower spawn system currently works, and some of the rougher visual inconsistencies are also me still being pretty inexperienced with pixel art. This is basically my first real project, and I’m building it solo, so I’m still learning as I go.
You’re also right about the UI side. Outside of the bee and upgrade sections, I haven’t really done a proper design pass on most of the UI yet, so a lot of it is there more for function than presentation right now.
Your comments are genuinely very helpful, and I’ll try to keep all of this in mind as I keep improving it. Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback :)