Post by Cheeseness in Hive Time comments

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Thanks for your kind words! :)

If it's helpful, here are some thoughts on why Hive Time doesn't have time controls.

I experimented with time controls very early in development and found that it made it more difficult for players to observe the hive's details, which in turn affected how much room there was for being thoughtful about the impact of management decisions as well as how responsive players could be to unfolding situations (all of which are key to the game's intended experience in my eyes).

In most situations, there are ways that the game's management systems expose ways of speeding things up (eg: rebalancing population diversity to help research finish sooner or using pollination to increase pollen/nectar throughput). Time controls also seemed like they would take away any time that players could use to experiment and discover these sorts of things. In the end, leaving room for players to engage with gameplay to optimise their experience felt like the right thing to do.

Time controls are common in management sims, so I definitely understand that many players will expect them and be disappointed when they're not available. Hive Time intentionally bucks or subverts a number of genre conventions, and it's my hope that I've found ways to make it approachable and enjoyable for players regardless.

Hope that sheds some light!

Bo Carlsson3 years ago(+1)

I have the opposite @BloodAngelBa. I feel the game can be a bit too fast sometime and for me it lessens the feeling of serenity when playing. But it's still a wonderful game. Thank you!

/Bo

Cheeseness3 years ago

Thanks for your kind words also!

If it's helpful to know, the default Queen lifespan gives a lot of room for going slow, and the game won't punish you if you don't meet the 600 Jelly goal in time (unless you ticked the "Unforgiving game over" FYOF option when starting a new game). There are also FYOF options for disabling events and disasters, which can reduce the number of things competing for your attention.

Bo Carlsson3 years ago(+1)

Sorry I think my comment was a bit unclear. It is during the mid game segment I feel it can be a bit too fast. It's not that the goal of 600 jelly that is "the problem" (calling it a problem is a huge understatement), It's keeping track of everything for example balancing population and managing production. But it's probably just me getting overwhelmed a bit too easily and it's only for a short time. All this is extreme nitpicking. Your suggestion to disable events/disasters is great but it's also a great tools to learn the mechanics of the game and really satisfying to overcome.

Two other things:

1. I know you consider the game as finished, but are you considering more additions to the gameplay. For example goals/win conditions or more modifiers (like limiting upgrades).

2. I've run in to some problems that might be bugs (at least one of them). When reaching a population limit of about 1500 I can't seem to reach it regardless if I turn bee-sitters to 100%. It hovers around 800 bees. The problem might be that my computer is too slow.

I also found that when accessing Bee-pedia from the upgraded wax assembler you get the message "Something went wrong. It turns out that the 'wax_assembler' topic doesn't exist or isn't unlocked".

Regardless of all this the game is great and I've played it at least a hundred times. When I get a job again I will give a generous donation as a thanks for all your great work.

Cheeseness3 years ago

Thanks for the clarification and apologies or the assumption - I didn't realise you were talking about the mid-game!

Do you feel like resource needs/shortages drive a log of the instability/need for population and production management? I wanted the resource reserve system to give players some non-disruptive controls for managing/mitigating the impact of resource shortfalls, but I also wanted to structure the game so that players would likely experience friction first so that they would appreciate and understand how to use the reserve sliders when they got them.

Regarding point 1, I always wanted Hive Time to be a space where once a player had demonstrated that they understood the game's broad strokes, they could explore the extents of the simulation by setting their own goals. I've since discovered that many players aren't primed for that kind of experience, and I popped some suggestions in the "What now?" topic of the Beepedia's Help/Tips category. That said, "scenarios" were something that I had on my roadmap for what would have been the game's last major content update if things had've turned out differently.

To give some clarity to point 2, the under-the-hood mechanic for processing Beesitter labour allows up to three bees' worth of "birth debt" to be accumulated if the population is at its limit. This allows up to three bees to be spawned immediately at once as the population fluctuates so that there's no waiting period before the next bee appears. Because of this, your population will never be able to go above three bees per "tick" (a unit of game time that is not directly frame rate dependent, but will get longer if the game is running slowly) from Beesitter labour alone.

Whenever a new bee spawns at an upgraded nursery, there's a random chance for twins, which happens regardless of Beesitters or birth debt, so not having regular nurseries can push you a tiny bit higher, but there's still a theoretical limit that's affected by performance. It's also worth noting that Upgraded Beesitters' labour is worth more, so they'll reach that limit with fewer bees, making the maximum number of bees smaller (but the size of the non-Beesitter population would still be as large).

The most I've heard of someone having in the wild is 1800 bees, but I've tweaked how Beesitter labour is processed since then and haven't done a lot of thorough testing of where the fuzzy boundaries lie since. I might poke around with that next time I stream.

The Beepedia error is definitely a bug. I launched a new game today and need to give that most of my attention for a little while, but I'll get a patch with a fix for that out soon. Thanks!

Thanks again for your kind words. It's always nice to hear when Hive Time has resonated with someone. I'm very glad that Hive Time's pay-what-you-want model has prevented Hive Time from being a burden during a difficult time, and I hope your situation improves soon.

Bo Carlsson2 years ago(+1)

Hi. Sorry for my extremely late answer.

I'm not sure exactly. It's a bit hard to explain. I would say that an option to just slow down the speed a bit. I think my problem is that during the mid game your population and resources get full a bit too quick so it feels like you have to build nurseries and storage faster to keep up with the supply. I think this feelings are due to the history of resource managing games. As you wrote below; people aren't primed for a more relaxed gameplay. In traditional games the mentality is that if you can't store resources you are losing resources instead of thinking about is as a positive when you have full storage. It's kind of a glass half full (Hivetime) vs half empty (others). So a part of the problem is the genre in itself.

P.S. Have you considered localizing the game. Way back in the days I was part of the subtitle translation community where I both created new Swedish/English subtitles and translated English and Swedish ones. So if y'all are interested I would love to localize the game. There's not a lot of text so it wouldn't be that much of a hassle for me.

Thank you again for the great game.

Cheeseness2 years ago

Hi hi! No need to apologise. There's plenty going on in the world that's more important than Hive Time comments!

From my perspective as a designer, I see the genre conventions that I intentionally buck as a way of expressing commentary on those conventions. Giving players an opportunity to brush against post-scarcity and discover that a solely growth-oriented mindset doesn't offer limitless enjoyment is something I wanted to do, in the hopes that players with those mindsets would start giving more attention to other aspects of the game. I can understand that that's a friction point, though!

I should note that the way that "birth debt" is handled was changed in v1.2-95, and my previous description is no longer current. The changes are outlined in this post celebrating Hive Time's second beethday.

Localisation is something I would like to do, but there are a couple of hurdles. The first is that it is a little bit bigger than it might at first appear - I haven't done a count in a while, but I think it's around 8,000 words, which is large for a small game that isn't text-focused. Humour in general and puns in particular are notoriously difficult to localise since that kind of content is steeped in cultural and linguistic nuances that frequently don't exist or have different connotations in other languages - it's doable, but requires a lot of extra effort and rewrites. Last, but certainly not least is that since Hive Time started as a jam game that I didn't have intentions of growing into something bigger, it isn't structured in a way that is friendly toward localisation - there'd be a lot of work involved in externalising strings and getting the project ready for localisation.

I would like to localise the game into other languages, but I don't want to do it unless I can do it right, and that requires a lot more in the way of resources and time than I can justify giving Hive Time right now.

Bo Carlsson2 years ago

I totally agree with you about the friction in Gameplay. It's always a problem when trying to take a genre in a new direction. But it's still wort it and hopefully players will find the good things.

When it comes to localization. I find that word count often isn't a great measurement of how much work is required. I usually check how many instances of text there are. Are the text stored in the folder with json files? I can take a look and estimate how much time it would take. When it comes to puns etc I have a lot of experience. In addition to films I have adapted lyrics and other texts (fiction and non fiction) as a part of my linguistics education. And localizing things like idioms are half the fun.

But the most important question is how much effort it takes to adapt the code. And if you say the code isn't really made for multiple languages at the backend. Because if it's to much of a hassle for you guys it's not worth the effort. I have a limited knowledge when it comes to programming so that is not something I can determine.

/Bo

Cheeseness2 years ago (1 edit)

I have a pretty clear picture of the ins and outs (both from a programming perspective and a localisation perspective), and as I say, it's just not something I have the resources for.

Some of the game's strings are within its json files, but there are plenty that are not. Even if I ignore the cost of other people's time localising strings, the work of externalising those strings and implementing a system for tracking and substituting per locale is beyond what I can allocate to Hive Time - it's been a stretch to put together even the superficial patch that shipped today (which definitely wouldn't have been possible if I had the extra overhead of maintaining additional languages).

Edit: I also forgot to mention that since Hive Time's UI doesn't scale and isn't flexible, that represents another non-trivial amount of work that would be needed before I could consider localisation (in other games I've worked on, German and Russian localisations have required changes to layout handling).

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