Posted July 12, 2019 by Cheeseness
Buzz buzz, bee friends!
Today's update brings in the first WIP track from Peter "KestrelPi" Silk, who's recently switched focus to bring his composition skills to Hive Time. Here are some cool words from him about some of the thoughts behind it!
"When I first started thinking about the sound for Hive Time I was quite inspired by the organised hex grid, with this flurry of often chaotic seeming but purposeful activity over it, but there being a sense calm in that activity. So with this first piece I have in mind the opening of the game, as things are just beginning to happen, or perhaps when a new queen rises - and I wanted to convey that purposeful busy-ness and the hopes but also worries that come along with new beginnings. As a nod to the hexes, it's in 6/4. And as a nod to the bees, it is of course in bee minor."
Since we've only got one track at the moment, it's also repeating during gameplay with 3 minute gaps. There's a menu setting where you can disable the music if that's a bit too repetitive. In the interests of allowing Peter to test stuff in the game without waiting for new builds, I added a feature that lets him drop new tracks into a folder. Since I'd already done that work, I figured I'd just expose it for everyone, and so Hive Time now has custom music support. Click the "Open User Folder" button in the settings menu to bring up a file browser where you should see a "custom_music" folder.
I've also added activity indicator (the ones that appear in the bottom left to let you know what's just happened) icons for each research item, which should make completed research a bit easier to track among all the placeholder exclamation marks.
Full changelog: