Consider this the first formal announcement of the result of my work over the past nine months.
That’s right. I’ve been missing because I’ve literally been busy. Go figure.
After months of reading through textbooks on image processing, noise generation, papers by the likes of Perlin and Worley, and procedural development techniques—along with a little on fluvial and tectonic geomorphology—I felt I was ready for an actual application of it.
The Way of the Bee!
The Way of the Bee is a game about being a beehive. You are the queen, you are the colony. You fight against real threats to bees, such as fungal and pathogenic threats, overheating or freezing, resource starvation, predators, and weather and climactic threats.
Journey as a colony swarm to your chosen location. Establish a hive, and send out sentries to find floral groves and gather nectar to bring back to it.
Be wary of threats from birds to lizards and frogs to fish to bears, navigating a procedurally generated terrain to find the sustenance you need to grow the hive. Be mindful of getting winded, staying adequately warm, and dodging inclement weather that might otherwise cut your journey short.
Return to the hive after finding substantial groves and setting a marker, then communicate your find to the other bees with a dance. Get it right, and a swarm will depart for the nectar and automate the process… but be mindful of threats to their well-being!
Gather enough resources before winter, and you will have enough bees to form a second colony swarm, to go to a new environment, further progressing in the game and facing new threats in doing so. If you don’t have enough, weather the winter with casualties, and begin again in the spring with your remnant bees.
Along the way, you will encounter heat waves that require dedicated bees to cool the hive, frosts which will requires bees to expend calories to warm it, parasites and hive beetles, full-on attacks by wood peckers and bears, and even hornets. Learn the way bees can defend their hive, from massive stinging (at the cost of the bees that sting), overheating the enemy, and even mummifying it in propolis.
The choice, and the price to pay, is yours alone; but think quickly.
Experience the fear of losing your queen, and desperately expending precious resources to hatch a new one. See badgers, skunks, and birds and with untold terror. Sacrifice everything in the name of your hive and its survival. Understand the need to sacrifice sick bees who are not recovering, and send them away to die alone; or invest calories and workers in medical care until enough of the bees recover.
The colony must survive.
Coming soon, opening platforms will be Steam and Itch.io.
Michael Macha 