a charming first game. the honeycomb being a visual indicator of how much honey has been collected, a source for bonus points, and help collecting flowers as it grows bigger and overlaps them is very nice. I enjoyed experiencing the progression unfold.
thoughts:
- the meandering hexagonal skill tree is very suitable for the theme but I think it could be organised differently to make it more interesting - I was often playing a couple of rounds to be able to afford the next upgrade, so maybe having more, cheaper, less powerful upgrades organised in a branching fashion would make it feel more like I was making real choices with how I upgraded things.
- purchasing "flowers IV" seemed to tank my honey collection - I was getting 10k+ immediately prior and it dropped to 5k or less until I got several more upgrades. I think after "seed II" the density of flowers becomes way more important than the actual number, and "flowers IV" might be making them less dense overall?
- as someone with an interest in plants and gardening, the order and labeling of the flowers felt like it could be more thoughtful. having the basic one be "flower" is confusing when there are other types of flowers later, and having daisies be larger than sunflowers seems strange. I think an order like clover, daisy, sunflower or blossom, dandelion, clematis would make more sense. a lot of flowers bees really like have flower spikes or clusters (like lavender, milkweed, foxgloves, basil, goldenrod...) which might be something to think about for later updates where you might want the flower collecting mechanic to change a bit to keep it fresh. A little research on the kinds of flowers that are appealing to bees will help you make the theme more grounded.
nitpicks:
- flip the sprites on the bees when they're moving to the right so they're not flying backward half the time
- using "kills" as the column label for how many of each flower I collect feels like it's not the right word for this game. maybe just "collected" or "pollinated" or something else less violent since the flowers are not my enemies!
I'm truly thankful for you taking the time to write out this comment!!
Let me address your points here:
- Skill Tree: Agreed, I would like to make the pacing a little smoother in especially the mid game. The balance of not choice-fatiguing the player and still giving some room for options is quite hard to hit and design. For this prototype I just went for linear progress as it is much easier to make a fun experience. There is a lot of potential in the skill tree, I'm unsure I can "harvest" it (pun intended). I guess it is unclear to me if it would even produce a more fun experience, while requiring significantly more work.
- Flower IV: Thanks need to fix that. It's due to how I balanced the growth of the honeycomb with the increasing number of flowers. A little off and the honeycomb would just consume everything around it once it gets kicked off initially lol
- "flower spikes or clusters (like lavender, milkweed, foxgloves, basil, goldenrod...)" -> I like this idea, might experiement with that, thank you! And yea basic logic was neglected at some point during development (daisy vs sunflower size lol). I just liked the way they looked and left it as is.
- nitpicks -> will fix
Thank you again for engaging with my game :)) I will try to produce a better version asap.