I must be not getting something. The very first thing the tutorial tells you to do is make an exit. I click on cells, I build new cells, I left click, I right click... I click all over the place... and it never shows me anything to click on to "make exit." All my bees are apparently going to starve to death in their own hive because the game tells you to make a door but it doesn't teach you how to actually make a door.
Hmm! What happens when you left click on an empty cell (or one of the new cells that you've built)? Does a menu come up at all? If so, what's in it?
If you're building new cells, then the radial menus are at least partially working for you.
Edit: In case everything's working as intended, Exits live under the Resources submenu (they're where some resources come from), which the tutorial explains as seen below. The current active tutorial can be shown again by clicking the graduation cap icon in the bottom left.
Oh, thanks. I thought Resources told you how much Resources you have. Or had something to do with stockpiling Resources. I kept thinking, since the door is structural, it would be under the same menu category as Nursery and Workshop. Looking at it now, I realize you had the ++ integrated into the icon. Maybe consider renaming this to "Resource Production" or something similar? I know short words look nicer, but this game throws a lot of concepts at the player at once that aren't handled the same way they are in other RTS games. When you can't use existing tropes or genre conventions, you should be as specific as possible.
Role didn't make much sense to me, either, the first time I saw it. It has a picture of a bee. But you don't use it to build bees? You use it to build rooms. Rooms don't have a role. They have furniture in them. After playing the game a bit more, I eventually understood that "Role" is short for "Rooms that require a bee to have a specific role in order to use them." Except that the Nursery also lets you change a bee's role, or at least lets you influence the role distribution of newborn bees. I'm not sure what else you could call it besides Role. Maybe Job? But that doesn't really change things. If I think of a better solution to this, I'll let you know.
But on the subject of the radial menus, this is probably the most important suggestion I can make: Don't make the player fight their own muscle memory when learning new systems! Every single time I opened a menu after researching something, it felt like everything I'd previously learned went right out the window because now the things I have to click on are in a different place. It's friction. It's a reason players would churn out before learning the game. And you'll never personally experience this for yourself because you made the game, you're not learning it from scratch the way a new player would. You'll just have to take my word for it that this makes learning the game more uncomfortable than it needs to be.
The solution: Radials should display all the hexagons that will ever be there, and the ones the player doesn't have access to are just blank or greyed out or invisible. That way, as the player builds understanding of games systems, they are also building muscle memory. If you only listen to one suggestion from my post, please listen to this one. It's the biggest obstacle to learning the middle of the game right now.
Glad to hear you're up and running and thanks for sharing your thoughts!
To make sure there aren't any false expectations, none of these things are likely to change significantly, though I'll tack "cells" on the end of submenu names to help reduce opportunities for false assumptions in the next patch. Even if players don't follow the tutorial's instructions, there are only two incorrect submenus to look through for any given build option, and I'm comfortable with that as being manageable for our target audience.
FWIW, we had around a hundred people with varying levels of game and management sim (this game's genre) literacy playing Hive Time prior to release, brought onboard in batches across the course of development. UI design choices weren't made in a vacuum and do take into consideration more than just our personal experiences/perspectives. Everybody has different preferences and tolerances, though - it's totally OK to not appreciate our choices here.
Regarding radial menu item consistency, you may find using keyboard shortcuts more comfortable (default modifier for displaying them is Alt, and there's an option in Interface Settings for permanently displaying them).
Well now this "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" event keeps killing my population numbers for no reason. If the goal of this game is to subtly educate people about Colony Collapse Disorder, then good job, you knocked it out of the park. On the other hand if the goal of the game is to actually be a fun strategy game where you build and research a thriving beehive, then I'd like to please be able to turn this event off from the main menu.
(Seriously. Population crashed from 70 to 6. Absolutely nothing I could do about it. The game just decided it was time for my colony to fail now.)
Hive Time is a management sim about exploring and discovering sustainable balances/responses that can survive fluctuations/disasters, not a strategy game per se (we've been specifically avoiding strategy labels and tags). While it intentionally bucks some management sim conventions, inviting players to respond to (and later plan for) dramatic shifts in dynamics is not one of them.
I haven't come across a situation before where previously working Beesitters stop working for no reason and there aren't any events called "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" that I can recall writing. If you'd like to send me an email (address is under the "Technical help" section here on the store page) with a better details-to-snark ratio, I'd be happy to look into whether something is misbehaving and give you some instructions for manually disabling individual events.
I will add to this that even though I read that it said to click "resources" to build an exit, I was still confused by the tutorial because I thought "empty cell" meant a grid cell that didn't have anything in it yet (the green ones with white outline), and clicking on those there was no resources option, just "cell". I think the language used could be reworked to be less ambiguous.
Got some more Hive Time content for you all today. Thanks to Cheese for stopping by and dropping some knowledge hopefully I embarrass myself a little less this time :)
No need to feel embarrassed - these games have a lot of stuff to absorb and sometimes it can take a hive or two before everything is clear. Providing you're able to get on top of the nectar situation (more Exits and Foragers will help there), you should be on track :)
I'm not sure what you're after exactly, but you can modify some of the game's files by copying the json folder into your Hive Time user folder and editing them there.
Upgraded production facilities let you control production priority sliders. Upgraded storage sells let you set minimum resource reserve levels that won't be used in production. These combined with the ability to pause and resume production for particular resources is as much control as I want to give players over resource consumption for production.
Hi! To my knowledge, this only happens when the game can not locate the "fonts" folder.
If you email a copy of your game log to the address listed under the Technical help section of the store page above, I can take a look and see if we can get you up and running!
Absolutely beautiful game. Played it for HOURS. What really gets me are the little events- The cute art with the writing is just fantastic. Cannot wait for more content!
Regarding more content, while we do have updates planned, the core of the game as a "set your own goals and play as long as you are having fun" experience is unlikely to change.
Some players have overlooked the variations on gameplay that the Royal Decrees upgrade can give - if you haven't tried making a hive with a Queen that gives you halved Beesitter productivity or any of the handicaps that other negative effects offer, give it a try!
Here's first impressions, gameplay and commentary video I did on my channel for Hive Time today. Had a lot of fun, hope you all enjoy the video and a big thank you to the devs for sharing this game with us all.
my game just crashed and don't know where to report it to say i just put something here i have no clue why it crashed but it just closed itself like it was going to minimise and than crash the game ran great and had no other trouble??
very confused but good game for the rest if you want me to get the log where should i sent it to
The "Log, save, and config file locations" and "Technical help" headings here on the store page have the information you're looking for. If you could send your game log, save file, and a detailed description of what was happening at the time you experienced a crash, I'd be happy to look into it!
Hi lyoneel! Thanks for your thoughts. If you weren't aware, the game was made on Linux :)
Just to make sure there are no false expectations, we consider Hive Time to be a finished product. There'll be some patches and updates as time goes on, but it's probably best to not assume that there will be any dramatic changes.
For now, difficulty is best found by embracing voluntary constraints (building a hive with no defences, accumulating 600 jelly without ever researching jelly production, building a hive but never allowing your population to go above 60 bees, etc.) or from the negative effects provided by future queens after researching the Royal Decrees upgrade.
No plans for a Steam release. For now, I am committed to the pay-what-you-want model and that's not something that Steam offers.
I also prefer Itch in that it allows people to buy/download games without making an account (which is what seems to be the barrier to entry for people who prefer Steam).
Hi! Depending on the operating system you are running, right click on the downloaded file and select an option that says "extract." Make sure that all of the files and folders are properly extracted, and then run the Hive Time executable (a .x86_64 file on Linux, a .exe file on windows, and a .app bundle on Mac).
If you're still having trouble, you may want to consider using the Itch.io app https://itch.io/app
this game is really fun! slow at times though maybe thats just because im starting out one suggestion/request i have is that when you follow a bee the camera doesnt shake along with them? makes it kind of hard to focus on the bee
Do you mean tooltips for radial menu items when clicking on cells or main menu items?
A full scale manual seems unlikely for now, but the way that custom music currently works is that any Ogg Vorbis music files placed in the custom_music/background or custom_music/interstitial folders in your user folder (access this by selecting "Open User Folder" from the settings menu) will override existing game music if they share the same filename, or be added to the relevant playlist if they don't.
I forgot to follow up on this, but main menu items now have tooltips, and the Beepedia exposes further information about topics relevant to each radial menu option :)!
A friend was saying that they "need an app" for their Chrome Book, I'm not sure if you have any knowledge about whether the itch.io app is available to make this really extra easy for such people?
Did a bit of looking. It doesn't look like it is as simple as it could be. It looks like it would be just downloading, and then running that. Which for someone who, "needs an app" probably wouldn't work.
Hmm yeah. I don't know whether the Itch app is available through any vendor provided distribution channels (most distribution platforms don't like having clients for other distribution platforms available).
If it's running an ARM processor or something else that's not x86_64, that's also likely to be a problem for Hive Time.
I hadn't even considered that it might be an issue with the processor. It does seem that there are possibilities that it would not really work with a standard x86_64 or AMD64 build (more or less the same, but somewhat different). I don't really know if our laptop would work, and it *seems* like a lot of the chromebooks are similar processors (eek).
I really enjoy this. I have some minor issues however:
~ Looking in other windows while the game is active totally locks up the windows os. This is something to possibly look into.
I can't seem to find the reason or way to replicate how this is happening. Attempting in using any forensic tools to analyze behavior for errors is just freezing the os.
~ One of the controls is using the "Alt" button. This is something I had to change since "Alt + F4" or "Alt + CTRL + DEL" are system based shortcuts.
Having alt in the game cuts off the system shortcut access when the app is frozen.
Sorry to hear you're experiencing troubles. This isn't something that any of my Windows testers reported before release, but it's something I'd like to look into further. Would you mind emailing through some more information on your system (system specs, OS version, graphics driver version, etc.) and a copy of the game's logs from a play session where this has occurred to support @ jbushproductions.com? The logs folder can be found by selecting the "Show User Folder" option in the Settings menu.
Does this happen when the game is running in a window, or only when it's fullscreen?
Both actually. I tried to isolate the issue by only viewing the game window and nothing else, when I tried to get rid of a cell I didn't need, the game froze again. This behavior is really weird. I sent some info though.
Much improved! The sound effects and UI changes make it a lot easier to play. I got through it and made a new queenie just in time thanks to the vinehopper :)
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I must be not getting something. The very first thing the tutorial tells you to do is make an exit. I click on cells, I build new cells, I left click, I right click... I click all over the place... and it never shows me anything to click on to "make exit." All my bees are apparently going to starve to death in their own hive because the game tells you to make a door but it doesn't teach you how to actually make a door.
Hmm! What happens when you left click on an empty cell (or one of the new cells that you've built)? Does a menu come up at all? If so, what's in it?
If you're building new cells, then the radial menus are at least partially working for you.
Edit: In case everything's working as intended, Exits live under the Resources submenu (they're where some resources come from), which the tutorial explains as seen below. The current active tutorial can be shown again by clicking the graduation cap icon in the bottom left.
Oh, thanks. I thought Resources told you how much Resources you have. Or had something to do with stockpiling Resources. I kept thinking, since the door is structural, it would be under the same menu category as Nursery and Workshop. Looking at it now, I realize you had the ++ integrated into the icon. Maybe consider renaming this to "Resource Production" or something similar? I know short words look nicer, but this game throws a lot of concepts at the player at once that aren't handled the same way they are in other RTS games. When you can't use existing tropes or genre conventions, you should be as specific as possible.
Role didn't make much sense to me, either, the first time I saw it. It has a picture of a bee. But you don't use it to build bees? You use it to build rooms. Rooms don't have a role. They have furniture in them. After playing the game a bit more, I eventually understood that "Role" is short for "Rooms that require a bee to have a specific role in order to use them." Except that the Nursery also lets you change a bee's role, or at least lets you influence the role distribution of newborn bees. I'm not sure what else you could call it besides Role. Maybe Job? But that doesn't really change things. If I think of a better solution to this, I'll let you know.
But on the subject of the radial menus, this is probably the most important suggestion I can make: Don't make the player fight their own muscle memory when learning new systems! Every single time I opened a menu after researching something, it felt like everything I'd previously learned went right out the window because now the things I have to click on are in a different place. It's friction. It's a reason players would churn out before learning the game. And you'll never personally experience this for yourself because you made the game, you're not learning it from scratch the way a new player would. You'll just have to take my word for it that this makes learning the game more uncomfortable than it needs to be.
The solution: Radials should display all the hexagons that will ever be there, and the ones the player doesn't have access to are just blank or greyed out or invisible. That way, as the player builds understanding of games systems, they are also building muscle memory. If you only listen to one suggestion from my post, please listen to this one. It's the biggest obstacle to learning the middle of the game right now.
Glad to hear you're up and running and thanks for sharing your thoughts!
To make sure there aren't any false expectations, none of these things are likely to change significantly, though I'll tack "cells" on the end of submenu names to help reduce opportunities for false assumptions in the next patch. Even if players don't follow the tutorial's instructions, there are only two incorrect submenus to look through for any given build option, and I'm comfortable with that as being manageable for our target audience.
FWIW, we had around a hundred people with varying levels of game and management sim (this game's genre) literacy playing Hive Time prior to release, brought onboard in batches across the course of development. UI design choices weren't made in a vacuum and do take into consideration more than just our personal experiences/perspectives. Everybody has different preferences and tolerances, though - it's totally OK to not appreciate our choices here.
Regarding radial menu item consistency, you may find using keyboard shortcuts more comfortable (default modifier for displaying them is Alt, and there's an option in Interface Settings for permanently displaying them).
Hope that helps!
Well now this "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" event keeps killing my population numbers for no reason. If the goal of this game is to subtly educate people about Colony Collapse Disorder, then good job, you knocked it out of the park. On the other hand if the goal of the game is to actually be a fun strategy game where you build and research a thriving beehive, then I'd like to please be able to turn this event off from the main menu.
(Seriously. Population crashed from 70 to 6. Absolutely nothing I could do about it. The game just decided it was time for my colony to fail now.)
Hive Time is a management sim about exploring and discovering sustainable balances/responses that can survive fluctuations/disasters, not a strategy game per se (we've been specifically avoiding strategy labels and tags). While it intentionally bucks some management sim conventions, inviting players to respond to (and later plan for) dramatic shifts in dynamics is not one of them.
I haven't come across a situation before where previously working Beesitters stop working for no reason and there aren't any events called "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" that I can recall writing. If you'd like to send me an email (address is under the "Technical help" section here on the store page) with a better details-to-snark ratio, I'd be happy to look into whether something is misbehaving and give you some instructions for manually disabling individual events.
I will add to this that even though I read that it said to click "resources" to build an exit, I was still confused by the tutorial because I thought "empty cell" meant a grid cell that didn't have anything in it yet (the green ones with white outline), and clicking on those there was no resources option, just "cell". I think the language used could be reworked to be less ambiguous.
v1.0-16v1.0-18 will have a note to further clarify that in the preceding tutorial.I love the personality put into this!
Thanks! :)
Got some more Hive Time content for you all today. Thanks to Cheese for stopping by and dropping some knowledge hopefully I embarrass myself a little less this time :)
Thanks again for sharing! :D
No need to feel embarrassed - these games have a lot of stuff to absorb and sometimes it can take a hive or two before everything is clear. Providing you're able to get on top of the nectar situation (more Exits and Foragers will help there), you should be on track :)
Can you add some kind of queuing system for the worker bees? Or add mod support?
I'm not sure what you're after exactly, but you can modify some of the game's files by copying the json folder into your Hive Time user folder and editing them there.
I mean some sort of priority system for the where the worker bees use resources.
Upgraded production facilities let you control production priority sliders. Upgraded storage sells let you set minimum resource reserve levels that won't be used in production. These combined with the ability to pause and resume production for particular resources is as much control as I want to give players over resource consumption for production.
this is super cute. thanks for making the game~
Cheers ^_^
first sorry for my bad english
i for some reason can't see text
https://gyazo.com/69a1d26b8c2a38c0c9db09a078788c06
otherwise great gameMikkel
Hi! To my knowledge, this only happens when the game can not locate the "fonts" folder.
If you email a copy of your game log to the address listed under the Technical help section of the store page above, I can take a look and see if we can get you up and running!
Absolutely beautiful game. Played it for HOURS. What really gets me are the little events- The cute art with the writing is just fantastic. Cannot wait for more content!
Many thanks!
Regarding more content, while we do have updates planned, the core of the game as a "set your own goals and play as long as you are having fun" experience is unlikely to change.
Some players have overlooked the variations on gameplay that the Royal Decrees upgrade can give - if you haven't tried making a hive with a Queen that gives you halved Beesitter productivity or any of the handicaps that other negative effects offer, give it a try!
Fantastic job on this, what a little gem of a game!
Many thanks! We worked hard to make Hive Time what it is and are very glad to hear that it's appreciated :)
Beemis is better
What the hell
WHAT THE HECKELLINI?
Cheers, and thanks for sharing as well! Glad to hear you had fun :)
my game just crashed and don't know where to report it to say i just put something here i have no clue why it crashed but it just closed itself like it was going to minimise and than crash the game ran great and had no other trouble??
very confused but good game for the rest if you want me to get the log where should i sent it to
Greeting
Marc
Hi Marc!
The "Log, save, and config file locations" and "Technical help" headings here on the store page have the information you're looking for. If you could send your game log, save file, and a detailed description of what was happening at the time you experienced a crash, I'd be happy to look into it!
Cheese
Thinks to highlight:
Nice game, great design, excellent screen transitions, great mechanics, I hope you the best in this project. Excellent performance on Linux.
What I saw that may can be improved:
- I think you must add a little of difficulty.
- The icons on save are not user friendly
- The way that events are presented to user breaks immersion, I think you need to show in less intrusive manner.
If you need testers in your final version here I am.
Hi lyoneel! Thanks for your thoughts. If you weren't aware, the game was made on Linux :)
Just to make sure there are no false expectations, we consider Hive Time to be a finished product. There'll be some patches and updates as time goes on, but it's probably best to not assume that there will be any dramatic changes.
For now, difficulty is best found by embracing voluntary constraints (building a hive with no defences, accumulating 600 jelly without ever researching jelly production, building a hive but never allowing your population to go above 60 bees, etc.) or from the negative effects provided by future queens after researching the Royal Decrees upgrade.
Hope that helps!
I didnt think in Royal Decrees. Good point.
Did you plan a steam release?
Thanks for you quick reply.
No plans for a Steam release. For now, I am committed to the pay-what-you-want model and that's not something that Steam offers.
I also prefer Itch in that it allows people to buy/download games without making an account (which is what seems to be the barrier to entry for people who prefer Steam).
How exactly do you extract the file?
edit: Nvm, i'm just stupid. i found it out tho
Glad to hear you're up and running!
How do you run the file
Hi! Depending on the operating system you are running, right click on the downloaded file and select an option that says "extract." Make sure that all of the files and folders are properly extracted, and then run the Hive Time executable (a .x86_64 file on Linux, a .exe file on windows, and a .app bundle on Mac).
If you're still having trouble, you may want to consider using the Itch.io app https://itch.io/app
this game is really fun! slow at times though maybe thats just because im starting out
one suggestion/request i have is that when you follow a bee the camera doesnt shake along with them? makes it kind of hard to focus on the bee
Thanks! I'll have a think on that one :)
In case you haven't spotted, I added a smooth follow camera option a couple of days ago. Enjoy :)
https://cheeseness.itch.io/hive-time/devlog/116502/v10-14-changelog
Oh thanks!
Any chance of tooltips for some of the options in the menus? Also, any chance of a manual for covering things such as custom music?
Do you mean tooltips for radial menu items when clicking on cells or main menu items?
A full scale manual seems unlikely for now, but the way that custom music currently works is that any Ogg Vorbis music files placed in the custom_music/background or custom_music/interstitial folders in your user folder (access this by selecting "Open User Folder" from the settings menu) will override existing game music if they share the same filename, or be added to the relevant playlist if they don't.
Hope that helps!
Main menu items certainly. The radial menu could do with them, too.
Explaining the difference between background and interstitial music might be helpful here, too.
An interstitial track is played between every background track unless there are no interstitial tracks to play.
I forgot to follow up on this, but main menu items now have tooltips, and the Beepedia exposes further information about topics relevant to each radial menu option :)!
A friend was saying that they "need an app" for their Chrome Book, I'm not sure if you have any knowledge about whether the itch.io app is available to make this really extra easy for such people?
I'm not certain! I don't have any first hand experience with Chrome OS.
Did a bit of looking. It doesn't look like it is as simple as it could be. It looks like it would be just downloading, and then running that. Which for someone who, "needs an app" probably wouldn't work.
Hmm yeah. I don't know whether the Itch app is available through any vendor provided distribution channels (most distribution platforms don't like having clients for other distribution platforms available).
If it's running an ARM processor or something else that's not x86_64, that's also likely to be a problem for Hive Time.
I hadn't even considered that it might be an issue with the processor. It does seem that there are possibilities that it would not really work with a standard x86_64 or AMD64 build (more or less the same, but somewhat different). I don't really know if our laptop would work, and it *seems* like a lot of the chromebooks are similar processors (eek).
This gonna be available on console if you get enough backing?
No, sorry. Open platforms only.
Shame
It really is.
I really enjoy this. I have some minor issues however:
~ Looking in other windows while the game is active totally locks up the windows os. This is something to possibly look into.
I can't seem to find the reason or way to replicate how this is happening. Attempting in using any forensic tools to analyze behavior for errors is just freezing the os.
~ One of the controls is using the "Alt" button. This is something I had to change since "Alt + F4" or "Alt + CTRL + DEL" are system based shortcuts.
Having alt in the game cuts off the system shortcut access when the app is frozen.
Sorry to hear you're experiencing troubles. This isn't something that any of my Windows testers reported before release, but it's something I'd like to look into further. Would you mind emailing through some more information on your system (system specs, OS version, graphics driver version, etc.) and a copy of the game's logs from a play session where this has occurred to support @ jbushproductions.com? The logs folder can be found by selecting the "Show User Folder" option in the Settings menu.
Does this happen when the game is running in a window, or only when it's fullscreen?
Both actually. I tried to isolate the issue by only viewing the game window and nothing else, when I tried to get rid of a cell I didn't need, the game froze again. This behavior is really weird. I sent some info though.
nice game but plz put a are u sure about deleting saves
(and congrats on release)
Delete and overwrite confirmation prompts are on the todo list (but weren't worth delaying the game for). Sorry for any inconvenience!
ok
The current build should now prompt for confirmation before deleting or overwriting saves https://cheeseness.itch.io/hive-time/devlog/114464/v10-2-changelog
wow that was fast
It's something I'd already wanted to do, and it seemed to have tripped up a few people, so it was worth getting something in quickly ^_^
I'm loving it! Do you plan to add localization? I'd love to help.
No plans for localisation right now, but thank you for the offer!
Gratz on Release!
Thanks!
Congrats on the release!
Thanks!
This is awesome, will continue to follow
Cheers ^_^
Much improved! The sound effects and UI changes make it a lot easier to play. I got through it and made a new queenie just in time thanks to the vinehopper :)
Nice :D
The test build for linux works well and is quite fun.