A Gun That Shoots Bees – Late post mortem

I spent a long time toying with my usual trying-to-be-too-clever-for-their-own-good weird, unusual game ideas linked to the theme before I asked myself half-jokingly if I should just make a game witha gun that shoots bees.

…so I did.

It was refreshing for once to just make a stupid game about something stupid, and focus entirely on the Fun™. I ended up with a silly top down game where you have a bee shooting gun and you have to defend the hive from incoming bears.

This was very, very simple and as enjoyable as firing bees from an oversized machine gun was I could tell by itself it would lose its charm fast, so I moved to add a system of passive upgrades that you could recieve by taking the risk of moving away from the central hive to collect nectar from flowers.

So overall the game ended up being about shooting bees at bears, keeping the middle safe while being able to collect your bees afterwards and managing your ‘ammo’, and also managing your nectar and finding gaps to go and forage for upgrades. I think it ended up reasonably interesting and I’m satisfied with the amount of depth I managed to claw out of these simple mechanics.

I also implemented some kind of weird mechanics whereby bees would be distracted by flowers and bees would be drawn to them but I don’t think many players notice this or that it adds a great deal. It didn’t really work out in the way I wanted it to but it at least felt kind of cool to see the bees kind of bend in an arc around flowers. (The idea would be you could use this to shoot around corners? but it wasn’t very effective or necessary as a mechanic in the end and is just sort of a nuisance to the player.)

No music for the entry either, music that would have actually made the game better is beyond my ability to make, I’m only really very capable of certain styles at the moment and the time was better spent on other things.

I had a ton of fun streaming the development and the endless chat bee puns, many of which ended up in the game in some capacity. Was also great fun to pull out Flash again for the art work, I was never much of a pixel artist anyway!

-S