Not my kind of game but I really liked the art

Bees are great! The game is great!
Had a lot of fun playing.
Didn't get how it fit the theme though.
You could also try to show what the types of bees are in game (e.g. show a little box with their name "worker", "builder" and so on when you hower with your mouse cursor over them)

I felt a strong disconnect between pressing the buttons on the UI and seeing state change in the game. I know that you gave a tutorial about what the units are too, but having their names in the UI would go a long way since they look so similar. Cool concept and would like to see it with some more polish :)

Seriously fun! Please do continue to work on this. I can see the potential and I love bees! Obviously there's a tutorial missing and there's a lot of mechanics to flesh out, but the base of the game is surprisingly fun. Good work on this and I look forward to seeing if you update it!

The gameplay felt pretty boring, mostly just waiting around.

The art looks good though, also like the fitting website theme. Good job on that!

I love all the bee-themed puns, and the graphics. The game maybe lacks a bit of challenge, it seemed quite easy to progress. Anyway, great game!

Definitely not the type of game that i usually play, but this was kind of nice, i enjoyed watching the beehive grow. Might not fit too well with the theme, as hives just get bigger and not really deeper imo, but the visuals were nice, the music is really relaxing, and you even provide the option to mute the buzzing lol

I have to parrot @candlebird and ask you to continue working on this as well! I really like the idea and it feels like it has a lot of potential buried in the ideation. Without repeating what others have said here, the audio was choppy on two of my machines for some reason (HTML5 version), but other than that the presentation is pretty slick given the time constraint. Hope to see you keep working on it!

Lots of things to love, the art and the sounds are awesome. I am pretty sure I have learned something about bees by just playing the game. Reading the itch page is definitely a must, I had no idea what am I doing before.

Couple issues I have noticed, winter honey disappears visually but stays in your counter and I think queen is using the counter not the visuals so essentially winter is free. My queen got stuck in my first run and refused to lay eggs anymore. I think it had to do with going to lay egg just when winter hit. Would love to know if the hive splitting is implemented, I had 4 drones and queen egg ready but nothing happened. And I assume enemies did not make the cut?

I love bees the bees game is the bees knees

Thank you for all your feedback, bug reports and appreciation! Happy so many people enjoy it. We want to give the game some more love when we have the time.

Also, there is an official guide in the Itch community if you want a deeper understanding about what's going on 😊

this game is so adorable, the colors and the little bumblebees!! i had a bit of trouble understanding the gameplay thoroughly but the graphics are very cute.

Cool game! First I had to figure out which bee is which. Sorry, Bea and Abeegail ;) But soon the honey was bumblin' in. All bees starting in spring was satisfying to watch.

I just don't know about the approach to the theme. Bigger and Bigger would have been more fitting. But hey - Bees! :D

@zolar yeah the theme is something that might seem a little abstract in the current version. Our idea is that the more you grow your hive, the deeper your queen can move into it (and the more space you get). The main missing feature is a guarding mechanic where sometimes enemy bees will try to kill your queen and steal your honey, so the deeper you go the more protected you are. ^-^

The queen and the hive does still move deeper, she just doesn't have much to hide from in this version :)

Nice idea, it lacks a bit of polish to really feel engaging, most actions lack a bit of feedback (for example when selecting actions there isn't a clear animation or SFX to let the player know what is going to happen). I end up playing for 3 years, and had a lot of fun seeing the hive progress, currently I would say that it feels like an idle clicker, as there are no threats or situations that force to change the strategy (just create foragers and a builder every once in a while). It was difficult to tell apart the different type of bees, but the pixel art is very nice and realistic! Super appreciated the menu with the volume bars and the ability to turn out the buzzing. Bees are the beest!

Very good! I see the work that was put into it! Great game.

Fun entry and interesting concept! I enjoyed playing it, but I wonder if it gets harder later on. I spent quite some time on the game and it didn't seem too hard to manage the honey for winter. Are the foreign bees implemented? If so, I don't think I've encountered any (unless my guard bees did their job while I was not looking :stuck_out_tongue: ). Also, is there a motivation for splitting early or can I just go really deep before splitting a couple times?
Anyway, good job on the game - it's a great entry!

@woergbi Sadly we didn't have time to implement the enemy bees. We were planning to make it so when you have a bigger hive there is also the chance for a whole group or "army" of swarm bees to attack your hive and thus make the difficulty also scale somewhat. But right now it's just the winter.

We're glad you enjoyed it!

nice game.

It was a fun game. I felt comfortable because of the game music. However, it was difficult because I couldn't find the difference in the graphic when choosing a bee.

Really cool idea! I had fun watching the hive grow and survive through different seasons. It was also interesting to learn a little more about how bees operate. Definitely has potential for a bigger game once you flesh out some of the elements. Good job!

I like the art, but I would suggest 2 small changes:
- when clicking on the pause menu, you can make more evident the resume button (it literally took me 1 minute and calling my boyfriend, because was only seeing the center hexagon, thought the bottom ones where the bees xD)
- differentiate a little bit more the bee types (maybe is enough by showing the name of the bee type under each bee tile on the bottom)
other than that, great job!! :smile:

Unbeelievably fabeeulous idea and beeautiful bees.

Thanks once again for your helpful comments everyone!

@laurari will definitely look at that, the bee names on HUD is something we are going to implement in the update 😊

@ping78 beery nice to hear!

The Game is fun and enjoyable to watch and I think you need to add more stuff on the screen like the bees name and maybe give players small goals to achive like pop up screens. also the bees need to be in different art and if you want to go with outlines maybe choose colors that are different from each others. in general great job guys, I enjoyed my session.

I played it and have been reading the comments, I had fun growing the hive but when I splitted it I felt as the game was "finished", I could be playing in a loop because with a nice planning the winter will never kill you, so the enemy bees will be a great addition for the game, it will make it more challenging! Waiting for that update to play it again :) In addition I would like to see my "score" in the HUD to motivate me to keep growing, when I pause I see my played time and times splitted, if that was translated to: 25240 points! Would keep my interest to keep playing. Anyway it kept me entertained for +30 mins, so I'm sure that is a really good game ^^ nice work guys!

@anaxie-studio How to split the hive?
I have 10 drohnes already, a second queen which won't come to live ... am I missing something?

Nevermind - I let it running and the SPLIT! Button appeared.

Nice idle game, just wish for a work queue, I don't think that enemies are something that needs to be added, sure the Guars are pretty useless as it is, but it is a calm game ^^

super cool concept, although as a few others stated, it was hard to see when my interaction with the bees affected the gameplay. Also would love to see a bit more distinction across the bees as they were very similar and the color outlines were hard to distinguish. can't wait to see this game in it's full glory!! great work!

I really like the rts mixed with bees theme. It was relaxing, thank you for allowing the buzzing to be turned off. It really needed something else besides winter as an obstacle. Also I think it needed a fast foreward button because for the most part its just waiting. Also a tooltip telling you what type of bee you are hovering over and a unique name for each of them would have been a nice touch.

@c4scar thanks. We are already working on some of those features for the post-jam version ;)

Great game idea! I loved sim ant back in the day and bees are just as interesting for an rts :)

Awesome relaxing mood with the music and buzzing.

There was not much to do yet. I believe that lots of content was left out. I could just add the foragers every year without facing problems, just keeping an eye to the honey amount. Pollen did not ever seem to run out, additional builders were hardly needed, guards did nothing and I'm not sure if drones were needed for the split. Split of course was a good way to cut the consumption if there were too many bees for the winter or too little space... But I never ran to either of those problems.

Also some kind of tooltips or something would be good, as nothing ingame told which bee was which caste. You could even work with symbols for every action, as you had a good start already... then it would be international out of the box.

Still, nice and very promising game! I'm waiting for an advanced version or even a full commercial game. Bees are a hot topic on the world right now and there certainly is space for a bee game in the scene :slight_smile:

@tomssuli thanks for the great feedback! Some content was indeed left out due to time constraints, but we are working on putting some of it (and some of the things you and other comments also mentioned) into a separate update to make the game more complete! It should come out pretty soon :)

We are also finishing up our main project (called Mergiverse, info on Twitter), so Bee Beesness might not see more updates for a while until we are done with other projects, but it's definetenely something we might revisit more in the future! It's nice to see people like the concept.

very fascinating to look at:) i like the music and the look of the background. the gameplay is fun to figure out and i love bees