HomeGrown 0.6.5 - Bees!

Since finishing the Gamescom videos I've been working on a big new feature for HomeGrown: beekeeping! Get yourself some bees, look after the hives, and start harvesting that sweet honey.

Gamer Tier+ patrons can download and play Homegrown here.

And for Programmer Tier+ patrons the code is available here.

You can see the bees in action in the latest devlog video.

Beehives

A new shop has opened up in town, the bee shop! You'll find it near the restaurant, to the right of the town center. Here you can buy everything you need to begin your beekeeping journey! To start with, get yourself a few of the basic beehives and put them on grass tiles in your farm.

Once you've placed a beehive the bees will get to work making honey! The honey content in your beehive will increase slowly over time, and can be harvested using empty honey jars whenever you like.

Higher tier hives can store more honey so don't need to be emptied so often. They also come with more bees, and therefore produce honey faster. The better hives are of course more expensive though, so you'll have to work your way up to them!

Stinging

When harvesting honey, there's a chance that you'll get stung! This interrupts the harvesting action, and any remaining honey in the hive is spilled. To avoid wasting produce like this you can buy some protective beekeeping gloves, which will significantly reduce your chance of getting stung.

The more bees in a hive, the higher the chance you have of being stung. Therefore, as you start working with higher tier hives you'll probably want to upgrade your gloves at the Upgrade Shop in town to ensure safe harvesting!

Flowers

The bee shop also sells a selection of wild flowers that you can grow around your beehives to support your bees. You can just plant them straight onto the grass, and they don't need watering. Once grown, your bees will land on the flowers to collect nectar. The more flowers you have directly next to a hive, the faster honey will be produced.

This boost to honey production comes with a trade-off: more manual maintenance. The flowers don't stay fresh forever, and will eventually turn brown and die. Once this happens the bees will no longer be interested in them, and they'll need to be replaced.

You can use the new shears tool to cut back the flowers. This retrieves the seeds, meaning you don't need to buy new flowers each time. The downside is simply the additional maintenance work of cutting and replanting them every now and again. If you're willing to invest a bit more money, you can buy higher tier flowers that stay fresh for much longer, reducing the amount of manual work required.

Bee-haviours

I had a lot of fun implementing the bee movements and behaviours over the last month - it really reminded me a lot of my time working on Equilinox! The animations for the bees are especially Equilinox-esque, with the whole bee entity rocking back and forth to give the impression of the wings moving, without me having to actually animate them.

The movement code is fairly simple too - I can give the bee a target point and it will start moving forwards at a constant speed, while changing its rotation until it's facing the target. It then just continues travelling straight until the target is reached. I can also mark the target as a landing node, and that causes the bee to decelerate as it approaches the target, coming to a smooth stop on the node.

For the bee behaviours I used behaviour trees - the same system I'm using for the villagers in the town area. I programmed some actions such as visiting the hive, landing on a flower, and flying around aimlessly, and then put these into a behaviour tree to get the bee to periodically switch between these actions.

Coming Soon...

Next up, I'd like to implement some simple manufacturing machines into the game, so that you can process your crops into more expensive products if you want. This will involve things like converting olives into olive oil, or fruit into juices.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for your fantastic support <3

Karl