Week 3: Polish and Pathfinding

Welcome back.

This marks the final week of the game jam and my last devlog for this game, I would like to have a chance  to outline what all I accomplished with this final week and reflect on the game as a whole.

- Polish -

I spent most of my week going around different design choices in the game and making them look better. I spent a lot of time making the menus have really fun animations that make them more connected to the game. For the almanac I made it grow in and out of existence, The end of day summary comes down from the top and the papers toss themselves upon your desk. I also added some particles every time you place or remove a zone to make it seem like the zones are just appearing from no where (When they really are). The final general polish I added was a slight idle animation to the bees and a main menu screen.

- Pathfinding -

The major interesting thing I did this week has to be the pathfinding. I made it so that at the end of every day you can see the bees leave their homes to go to work and then have the honey make its way to the queen. Having very little experience writing pathfinding algorithms and especially not for hexagonal grids I was a bit intimidated by the challenge. Fortunately I found lots of good information online to help me (If I haven't linked this article yet it has basically taught me everything related to hexagons). Using the algorithms I found online and lots of recursion ("You can solve anything if you use enough recursion" - Me, 2023) I was able to make a workable Dijkstra algorithm that is able to path along the tunnels to connect factories and houses. Now all of the bees have to make their daily commute to work instead of being in a superposition of at home and at work all the time (I'm sorry). Next all I did was implement the pathfinding again to have the honey walk itself towards the queen.

- Playtesting -

When I tried to playtest the game all of the bees rebelled against me since I was trying to remove bugs.

- Reflections -

This has been one of my most successful game Jams yet. I did a great job keeping the vision simple so that I didn't get carried away with feature creep (like I did with PTV). In some ways I think the game is almost too simple, If I had more time to perfect game balance I think the game could be quite fun where you could optimize your hive to oblivion in an attempt to keep the tax man away. However, since the game is currently really unbalanced it seems like you have no real challenge at all keeping up with the demands. 

I wish I had more time to work on the tax requirements, currently there are only a couple of things that they are tied too and it repeats quite a lot. While this works to make the taxes feel chaotic and random it would be more fun if I could have each turn slow down and force you to make strategic decisions.  I could probably help this if I made the hive much smaller since you have to constantly be sacrificing buildings to optimize your hive. I could also make the taxes more adaptive so that the government specifically tries to target aspects of your hive you may want to improve each turn, forcing you to decide if dealing with more taxes is worth the increased burden. This would fix one of the major issues with the current system where the only real threatening requirement is honey made and that is kind of impossible to avoid. Making the requirements more adaptive would also let me use them on a day to day basis rather than a week by week basis.

Tl;dr Going into this project I started with a really simple idea that had a lot of directions I could go with it. This let me create a really cool concept for a game and gave me a great little game that has some really cool programming involved. If I had more time this game has a lot of potential to eventually be really fun to play.

Like I said at the end of my last set of Devlogs, Join the game jams! they are really fun, and if I can stop avoiding working with people they are great ways to socialize as well. Regardless by the end of it you have something you  can point at and say "I made that".

Everyone Thrives Together

Department of Beesource Management  Tadomite