Post by Cheeseness in Hive Time comments

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Glad to hear you're up and running and thanks for sharing your thoughts!

To make sure there aren't any false expectations, none of these things are likely to change significantly, though I'll tack "cells" on the end of submenu names to help reduce opportunities for false assumptions in the next patch. Even if players don't follow the tutorial's instructions, there are only two incorrect submenus to look through for any given build option, and I'm comfortable with that as being manageable for our target audience.

FWIW, we had around a hundred people with varying levels of game and management sim (this game's genre) literacy playing Hive Time prior to release, brought onboard in batches across the course of development. UI design choices weren't made in a vacuum and do take into consideration more than just our personal experiences/perspectives. Everybody has different preferences and tolerances, though - it's totally OK to not appreciate our choices here.

Regarding radial menu item consistency, you may find using keyboard shortcuts more comfortable (default modifier for displaying them is Alt, and there's an option in Interface Settings for permanently displaying them).

Hope that helps!

WarpZone4 years ago

Well now this "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" event keeps killing my population numbers for no reason. If the goal of this game is to subtly educate people about Colony Collapse Disorder, then good job, you knocked it out of the park. On the other hand if the goal of the game is to actually be a fun strategy game where you build and research a thriving beehive, then I'd like to please be able to turn this event off from the main menu.

(Seriously. Population crashed from 70 to 6. Absolutely nothing I could do about it. The game just decided it was time for my colony to fail now.)

Cheeseness4 years ago

Hive Time is a management sim about exploring and discovering sustainable balances/responses that can survive fluctuations/disasters, not a strategy game per se (we've been specifically avoiding strategy labels and tags). While it intentionally bucks some management sim conventions, inviting players to respond to (and later plan for) dramatic shifts in dynamics is not one of them.

I haven't come across a situation before where previously working Beesitters stop working for no reason and there aren't any events called "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" that I can recall writing. If you'd like to send me an email (address is under the "Technical help" section here on the store page) with a better details-to-snark ratio, I'd be happy to look into whether something is misbehaving and give you some instructions for manually disabling individual events.

WarpZone4 years ago

I don't remember what the exact text of the event is, I just described what it does. The text was something like "Fewer beesitters are being born for some reason." So I cranked up the number of beesitters to compensate. Then all the bees died at once.

The player experience was indistinguishable from "Beesitters randomly stop working for no reason" because all the nurseries suddenly sat empty. Adjusting the sliders did nothing. The game just decided it was time for my colony to die. I feel like I did everything I could and it was ineffective.

I'm sure this is by design, but I don't understand why you chose to design it that way. I was trying to beef up my numbers so I could start working on Honey, when suddenly the game decided to kill my colony.

Do you get what I'm saying? I had a ton of nurseries and a ton of beesitters, and the game suddenly announced the event and killed my colony.

I get the impression the description of the beesitter-killer event was deliberately vague about the cause because it's not designed to have any counter-play. If this is not your intended design, please explain how a hive with 30 beesitters could avoid this event or account for it after it pops up. What was the player expected to do differently in this situation?

I needed more nectar so I built more nurseries because bees provide nectar. There's literally no other way to get more nectar that I know of, other than by building more nurseries.

Cheeseness4 years ago

This is not an email, which is what I requested, and it is not really focused on details. I'm sorry to hear that you're not enjoying the game, and while I am generally interested in hearing about players' experiences, I'm not able to offer assistance to anybody who refuses to follow instructions.

There is no event that behaves as described. My best guess is that it's referring to a warning notification that is intended to help players identify that there's a potential population issue when the cause has been overlooked.

In case anybody reading gets the wrong idea, significant population declines are not the failure-state this player presents them as. When Beesitter populations are at zero, bee spawn rates return to what they were at the beginning of the game before any Beesitters had spawned. Learning how to recover from these situations and how to prevent them is a part of the game. Some people enjoy this, but it's OK to not. Keep playing if you're having fun. Stop playing if you're not.

itch.io

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