Hive Mind by Matthew Hrehirchuk

The bees are under attack! You must keep the colony alive.
Repair the damaged honeycombs. Fight off the predator wasps. Protect the queen!

The game:
Programming and SFX: whycardboard
Art: mateusboga
Made in Gamemaker Studio 2. Art in Aseprite. SFX in BFXR. Music found online.
| Youtube | https://whycardboard.itch.io/hive-mind |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/hive-mind |
Ratings
| Overall | 1195th | 3.512⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1083th | 3.386⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1036th | 3.378⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 450th | 4.033⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 722th | 3.957⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1154th | 2.905⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1589th | 3.174⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 45🗳️ | 63🗨️ |
The game itself is intuitive and easy to learn, and it gets pretty hectic as the holes open up faster! At some point I was really frantically clicking and I got really into the game!
Some notes I have:
- The bee animation is nice, but it could use a little more; Simple things like nodding the head and slightly moving the legs would help them look a lot more alive
- The contrast for the background is really high and it becomes a little hard on the eyes after staring at it for a while. Lowering the contrast would alleviate that while bringing out the holes a bit more to the user, two birds with one stone!
- The random bee movement can be a little bit annoying when holes open up and I have to wait for bees to move across the whole level to get there if I just so happen to not have bees close by. Perhaps you can look into having two types of bees and being able to 'buy' bees with produced honey so the player can get better bees as the game progresses. Just an idea :)
The artwork is really good, especially that cover image!
Overall I really enjoyed the game, the difficulty curve and pacing is pretty well balanced too! Great work :)
(note: played on linux using wine, it works perfectly!)
Managed to get quite far but at the end I'm surely was overwhelmed by the number of wasps getting in the nest.
Didn't had enough much time to actually save the queen!
some feedback: Would have been nice to see a timer of how long did I stay in the game :) and also when wasps were stacking on each other on the queen, with their health bar it was a bit messy to understand how much bees to send. it resulted in a bar brawl pretty much :smile:
Nice entry and good choice of the music in 8-bit!
Thanks for having playing our game!

I would love if bees that are near holes start to repair them by themselves.
Solid entry, cheers!
Besides that, I had a lot of fun with the game, and it felt really polished! Great work!
It got hard really fast tho!
the sound track fits the game .. kind off?
I wish the controls were easier. it felt a bit off for some reason. maybe selecting bees should be easier?
I am a bit triphonic got really annoyed by wasps entering the hive through holes X)
so its the one run for me...
And using Flight Of The Bumblebee as the soundtrack is just genius. great work.
For some reason wasps started spawning all at once, which make it impossible to defend the queen, I'm not sure if that's intended.
Nice idea, clean execution, well done :v:
Not much to critisize, except an easier way to select bees and a more visible way to see which bees were doing something and which weren't would have been useful, the difficulty also ramps up pretty fast. Very very nice though!