Build a hive, make some honey! Hive Time is a small, bee themed management/base building sim. Harvest resources, grow your hive, and produce a new Queen before the current one dies.

A small hive

Manage different bee roles in a totally scientifically inaccurate depiction of hive dynamics. Send Foragers out to find pollen and nectar, have Builders research new cell types, and ensure you have enough Beesitters to raise the next generation of bees.

A special bee

Make interesting choices that affect the hive. Respond to wasp attacks, deal with outlaw slugs, or help a caterpillar realise a lifelong dream.

A silly vignette

Hive Time is available on Itch.io for Linux, MacOS (10.14 and lower), and Windows.

Website: http://hivetime.twolofbees.com/ Itch.io: https://cheeseness.itch.io/hive-time Bandcamp: https://kestrelpi.bandcamp.com/album/hive-time

NIce! I wasn't even aware we had bandcamp embedding here, seems we might need to adjust the CSS to better accommodate it, though... And welcome to the forums!

Looks cool.

What's up with needing Mac 10.14 or lower? Is that a Godot limitation or something else?

@Megalomaniak said: NIce! I wasn't even aware we had bandcamp embedding here, seems we might need to adjust the CSS to better accommodate it, though... And welcome to the forums!

Cheers!

@cybereality said: Looks cool.

What's up with needing Mac 10.14 or lower? Is that a Godot limitation or something else?

Thanks! I've written a bit more about Mac stuff over here, but the long and short of it is that I've been growing more and more uncomfortable with Apple's behaviour and changes in 10.15 were the straw proverbial camel's back.

I see, okay. Not a fan of Apple's practices either, but I plan to ship in MacOS (and probably iOS as well) simply because I want to support cross-platform and not add to the hostility. But I respect your stance. Also, hopefully Vulkan will be stable by the time I finish my game, so that will be a good option moving forward. Thanks for sharing your blog post.

Just to be clear, I'm continuing to ship Mac versions - I'm just only supporting older versions so that I can still look after users who're left behind by Apple.

Hi, I've played your game. I mastered it and built an unstoppable behemoth of a hive that left any outside threats outmatched. That was the end of my experience. It was satisfying but unfortunately does not offer very much replay-ability.

Still, quite enjoyable for many hours. I hope we see more base management games from the indie community as we still don't seem to get any from big studios.

@Kequc said: Hi, I've played your game. I mastered it and built an unstoppable behemoth of a hive that left any outside threats outmatched. That was the end of my experience. It was satisfying but unfortunately does not offer very much replay-ability.

Cheers!

Like many games in this genre, hurdles become trivial once you work out the simulation's dynamics. For players who don't find the late-game interesting, the option to start a new hive without having to start a new game any time a new Queen is spawned (whereas in most management sims, you'd need to explicitly quit your old game).

For now, I see the end-game as giving room for pursuing player-driven goals (like trying to spawn a new Queen with the smallest hive possible, trying to have as many simultaneous Queens as possible, never upgrading anything except the Workshop, etc.) or building elaborate/interesting shaped hives, even building out the entire playspace and creating a population capable of making the game's hurdles trivial (if that's what you enjoy). These kinds of approaches are where I found the most fun in management sims like the original SimCity, which provided a lot of inspiration for Hive Time.

The Royal Decrees upgrade also gives some potentially interesting gameplay variations for each successive Queen (a Queen that halves wax production is going to require a different approach to building a new hive, and a Queen that reduces Beesitter efficiency requires a different approach to finding population balances).

Replayability ends up being super subjective. It's totally OK to feel like you're done after your first Queen or first hive :)

9 days later

@MOSvisio said: The soundtrack is soooooooo good, i think i'll buy your game as soon as possible :)

Thanks! I'm really happy with how the soundtrack came out - Peter did fantastic work that is so far beyond anything I could've done on my own.

@jbrooks79 said: How did you make this, is epic, Great . . :D

Mostly, I just leaned on about 30 years' experience with making games in some form or another :)

If you've got any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them, but if you're more interested in my approach to development in general or my workflows, I kept pretty frequent dev logs, streamed my progress, and did write-ups for my Patreon supporters during development.

3 months later

Hello, fellow bee friends!

A few days ago (coinciding with World Bee Day!), I released the Informational Update, a big update for Hive Time that adds an in-game "Beepedia," some new game customisation options, some new visual effects that give weight to significant events, a stack of new Queen portraits, a small revamp to foraging, and a bunch more fixes and improvements.

I also made a new trailer that's presented as a bee news broadcast.

6 months later

As part of a patch I've been working on for Hive Time to celebrate it turning 1 next week (has it been out for a year already!?), I've been adding a couple of chat integration features.

Last night, I added the ability for "special bees" to be named after active chat participants, and relays their chat messages via in-game speech bubbles.

I've more or less written an IRC client (Twitch exposes an IRC-like interface, so I get to offer Twitch chat support without writing any Twitch-specific code, huzzah), which can connect to a server, join a channel, and listen for messages.

I've also added a few commands that will only be run if issued from an account that has my username, and I'm planning to add an option for chat participants to vote for event choices.

Exciting times!

9 days later
19 days later

I managed to squeeze out one last Hive Time trailer, this time (obliquely) focusing on the game's new chat features. It's a little rough, but I'm glad to have something overtly Australian-feeling in the trailer lineup now :)

a year later

Ooops, I forgot to share it last year, but I made a new trailer for the game's second birthday, this time giving thanks for some of the nice things that people have said about Hive Time over the years.

@cybereality said: Very nice!

Thank you!

10 months later

Hive Time turned 3 today! I released a patch that adds new Foraging gameplay, new "hats," new effect trails, new chat commands, new vignettes, and new facts. Full changelog is over on Itch.

a year later