Bruce is back! 

For the last 4 years, myself and Omar have been participating in the LOWREZJAM making "bee" themed games featuring our hero: Bruce Bee!  Originally it was just a visual theme for a random platformer game, but after getting some comments like "bees are a bad choice for a platformer", "the hero should be able to fly", for a laugh we opted to lean into the flightless bee thing and the next year came back with an endless runner. Since our first LOWREZJAM in 2018 we've been making tiny bee themed games and this year will be no exception! 

I've always wanted to make a Missile Command type game and I love the challenge of making something tiny so what better time time to try? I'm a better artist than I am a programmer so coming up with a visual concept easy but I certainly didn't expect to run into so many issues on the code end.

First it was an issue of bullets destroying the wrong targets so you can see in this screenshot here that I had to start matching IDs to make sure bullets could only destroy their dedicated "X". Then I was having problems with the different sprites and instances not tracking how I was intending and turns out I was creating overlapping objects. Then one of the menus wouldn't go away because I was triggering it in 2 places. All in all it's been a lot of little issues in the spaghetti that is the code for this game BUT I'm happy to say after almost a week, the basic game is in place. 

• You can shoot from all 3 hives (turrets) - each with 5 rounds
• Bullets go to designated "X"
• Hives and flowers (towns) are destroyed upon enemy impact
• Enemies spawn in waves
• Pause menu between each wave to award bonus points and refill on honey (bullets)
• Some Gameplay art is in place

There's still a lot of polish to be done and more features we'd love to add but I'm definitely happy with where we're sitting at the moment! 

I'm always so bad for keeping up with devlogs but let's see if I can remember to do a couple before the jam is over! 

Added a little HUD to the game! It's not really *that* important since everything on it except the score are displayed through the gameplay but the score looked lonely at the top plus it makes the game a little more challenging where it had been a bit too easy before. 

The hives surrender now too with a cute little animation and they also turn to a pile of rubble when destroyed! 

Omar has now got some time off work so I can't wait to see what he brings to the art of this game! We're in the fortunate position where we're both competent artists and programmers so handing the project back and forth around our schedules works great for us! Unfortunately he's going to have to make heads or tails of my code though! 

We're looking at creating some new enemy types now so I can't share more soon! 

It's late and I'm tired but the game is starting to feel pretty good! We've updated a lot of the sprites and added in this custom font that Omar made! Looking at creating new enemy types now and implementing some cute little text popups! Omar has also been working on some tunes so I'm super excited to hear how they come out! I generally don't leave sound design until this far into a project but that's something coming in the next few days as well. So much polish left to do, but it's to the point where you can play a game all the way through so we'll definitely have something to submit!