Greetings, hive friends!

Over the past week or so, I took a break from Hive Time to work on a side-project. As part of a talk I gave last week on making games in Godot, I needed a small example project to do a code walkthrough of. Hive Time is a little too big/sprawling/hastily made, so I quickly knocked together Honeycomb CRUNCH, a top-scrolling avoid-the-obstacles game that I've released for free (costs no money), and for Free (released under Free Software/open culture licences). If it sounds like your kind of thing, you can check it out over here.

With Honeycomb CRUNCH now savely stowed away in the Released Games basket, I spent today and yesterday getting the new main menu behaving. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but it's starting to shape up well, I think! At the moment, the settings menu doesn't do anything, and the load/save menus just automatically load/save the most recent/current hives as the previous S and L shortcuts did.

This build also brings in new animations for the Jelly Refinery, and reposition them. If you've got a save with a Jelly Refinery in it, you'll notice that its position is a bit weird. Other than that, there are a few crash fixes, and Escape will now close radial menus/close or select the negative option of events. Escape will also bring up the main menu again. Good times.

Hooking up the rest of the menu systems is probably going to be slow work without much in the way of visible/exciting gameplay progress, but once that's all in place, we should return to the kind of update cadence we had before last week.

I've also made the store page public (with builds not available), which should make it easier to share/follow the project as it moves forward. Controls and known issues are now listed in the download instructions page. It doesn't look super fancy at the moment, but I'll be updating it to be more exciting in the future ^_^

Full changelog:

• Added main menu
• Added credits screen
• Added Escape as a shortcut for closing radial menus
• Added Escape as a shortcut for closing/chosing negative response in tutorials/events/vignettes
• Added Escape as a shortcut for returning to the main menu
• Added event images for save/load success
• Added pop to radial menu buttons
• Added cell indicator highlight sprite to radial menu build costs pop up
• Added jelly refinery animations
• Updated jelly refinery cell layout to put 'origin' cell in the 'middle'
• Reordered player/game initialisation to better fit with new main menu behaviour
• Reordered GUI scenes
• Inventory fluff is now set based on bee activity
• Fixed save file not being closed when saving
• Fixed possible crash when stopping factory stop animation
• Fixed game load crash when bee inventory fluff is not present
• Fixed bee names are not being exhausted before being reused
• Fixed bees bees diving into exits (happens 1 in 20 times now)