Bee Careful Devlog

Hi, thanks for reading my devlog.

In this post, I’ll be documenting my process and experience developing my first game, Bee Careful. This short branching narrative game will be made in Twine, a program I’ve never used before. Hopefully, I don’t come to regret this decision, but from what I’ve seen, it seems like a relatively simple program. If I can figure out Godot, I’m sure I can handle this too.

09/05/24 - Coming up with the concept

The concept of the game is pretty simple - you find a flightless bee and you have to try to keep it alive. The player will be faced with various scenarios and must use their discernment to figure out which choices will give them a positive outcome. This concept is based on an experience I had this summer, where I actually did come across a flightless bee that I then befriended and started caring for. I learned a lot about bumblebees during my time with the bee, including things like bee body language and habits, which I plan on integrating into my game in a way. Another thing I learned is that bees are actually really cute. I felt genuine love for that bee, was both a good and a bad thing. It was a good thing because it made me consider the impact that something as small as a bee can have on someone’s life. It made me think about the fact that beauty and depth can be found even in the most mundane of places. My love for the bee - who I named Rosy - was also a bad thing because it made saying goodbye much harder. On top of that, what made saying goodbye even more difficult was the fact that a thoughtless choice of mine caused her death. In the game, I plan on including her actual death (probably as a bad or true ending), but also rewriting her story to include a happier one. I know its a bit silly to mourn over a bee I knew for three days, but she was honestly so cute and I loved her so I felt AWFUL about what happened. I can't bring my bee back to life, but I can make a cute game about her so then maybe I'll feel better about myself or something. Anyway, here's a picture of Rosy, the bee that inspired it all. She was so cute. I miss her

:(

09/06/24 - Addition of horror elements

Initially, I planned for the game to be entirely wholesome, but I got an idea I couldn’t ignore. I was telling my boyfriend about the game, and he jokingly suggested I should add an Eldritch horror bonus ending that completely shifts from the cute, wholesome theme. Instantly, I thought, “Great, now I have to do this.” So, in addition to a wholesome or sad version of the game, the player can also experience a horror variant. I love Eldritch horror and the incorporation of psychological or weird elements. The combination of these two separate loves could make for an interesting experience. I plan to implement this by giving players the option to harm the bee, which will trigger the horror version. If they choose violence, they get violence; if they choose peace, they get peace. If the player injures the bee, they’ll be swarmed by bees, stung until they pass out, and wake up in a giant beehive filled with grotesque humanoid bees. From there, they must endure trials (make correct choices) to potentially escape. If they step on the bee, they’re basically sent to mutant bee hell where they must repent for their crimes against bee-kind.

09/07/24 - Passage Outline

Today I outlined all the passages and various endings I want the game to have. Before I try to implement any mechanics, I wanted to try to have a solid outline for my game which includes the basic versions of all the various events and decisions. It actually took me a while to come up with everything, but not as long as expected. In the wholesome half of the game, I want the decisions a bit more straightforward and obvious, whereas I want the horror half of the game to be slightly less forgiving. In general, I hope to implement an HP system that allows me to remove certain amounts of HP when the player makes a wrong choice, and have the player be led to an automatic bad ending if they reach less than 10 HP. I would also like to include some choices that when selected, can impact the player's run of the game.

Right now, I have 6 endings planned, 3 for the wholesome version of the game and 3 for the scary version. Ending A will be the ideal ending, the one where the bee lives happily and eventually dies of old age, ending B will be the true ending and also the one that the player gets if they fail to keep the bee alive during the wholesome half of the game, and ending C will occur early in the game if the player decides they don't give a fuck about the bee and just ignore it. Ending D will occur if the player successfully escapes from the mutant beehive, ending E will occur if the player decides at any point to accept their fate and become one with the hive, and in ending F, the player will be devoured by the mutant queen bee. Ending F will occur only if the player reaches less than 10 HP.

I also decided that some of the choices in the game would carry more weight than others. In the wholesome half of the game, if the player makes the exact mistake that I made in real life with my bee, they will automatically get ending B. In the horror half of the game, the player will be confronted with a chance to release a human captive. By doing so, the player will later be given the option to escape with the released prisoner which will bypass the "boss fight", a final event that will automatically deduct 50 HP from the player. If they don't release the captive, the player will need at least 60 HP to survive the boss fight. If they do free the captive, they can achieve the same ending without having to take a 50 HP deduction and risk getting ending F. Now that I've got this all planned out I'm feeling simultaneously confident and nervous. I like what I have planned, but I hope that I don't have a hard time implementing everything. By choosing to have both a scary and wholesome version of the game I doubled my workload, but if I can successfully pull this off in the two weeks I have to make this game I'll feel pretty good about myself. Oh, and here's a screenshot of my Twine map node thing (I don't know what to call it and I'm too tired to care).

09/09.24 - Core Mechanics

Today I worked on making the mechanics for my game. Honestly, it was way easier than I expected. I watched a few twine tutorials online and picked it up quickly. I honestly feel like I don't even have much to write here because of how simple it all was. I guess I'll just mention some of the specifics.  For one, doing the actual branching narrative thing is just super easy to do in Twine and only requires some square brackets and the name of the next passage. The HP system was easy too. I just had to create the health variable and adjust it whenever the player made a wrong choice. The exact line of code I used for doing that was (set:$health to ($health-30)). I also threw in a few if statements for doing things like checking whether or not the player freed a captive - (if: $freedCaptive)[[[Escape|Escape]]] - and checking the players' HP to determine whether or not they should be sent to ending F and devoured by the queen bee - (if: $health < 10)[(goto: "Ending 2C")]. In general, all of mycode was extremely basic, but it works and does what I wanted it to.

09/11/24 - Writing

I finally finished writing the entire game. It took a while, but I'm happy with it. I wrote half of it twice, because I initially kept the wholesome half of the game in a more casual tone, but eventually decided that I wanted it to be more descriptive and emotional. I actually ended up writing the horror half of the game first, and I really got into that. When I write for this particular style of horror game, I tend to draw a lot of inspiration from specific sources. In my passages, specifically the short decision-making ones, my writing style is heavily influenced by the game world of horror. The best way I can describe this game is junji ito esque dnd. Fear and Hunger is also a huge inspiration for me. The developer of that game - Miro Haveranian - has a really great writing style. Its descriptive and grim, perfect for horror. I also drew inspiration from the Higurashi games/visual novels. The author of those stories - Ryukishi07- stands out for their range. Their writing is genuinely beautiful and poetic at times, and at others its down right horrifying, or sometimes a combination of both. I can't say that my writing is on par with these developers, but they their work has absolutely influenced mine, and I aspire to one day be able to tell stories as well as they do.

Anyway, I think that I wrote a decent game. I'm happy with the way things have been coming along.

09/14/24 - Art

Okay, I severely misjudged how long drawing my own illustrations would take. I should know this, I always take a really long time whenever I draw anything, so I'm not sure why I thought this would be any different. Regardless, I finished the drawings for the wholesome half of my game, and quickly realized that I don't have enough time to draw all the scary game art myself, so I had to find a few images instead of drawing them myself. I don't love that I resorted to that, but I think the game still looks good enough, and at the end of the day that's all that matters. I also ended up changing the bee's appearance pretty early on in my illustration stage. I started out with one drawing, planned on using it, did another one that was way better and just had to replace the old one. The initial drafts weren't great, so I'm definitely glad that I fixed them. I'll attach some images of them so you can see what I mean. In comparison to the final result, these kind of suck. 

The two art styles featured in "Bee Careful" are meant to be representative of the two varying emotional experiences the story is designed to provide. In the wholesome half, light and bright colours are used, things are kept cute and simple, and the brushes I used for the illustrations add to light hearted aesthetic. In contrast, the scary half of the game features illustrations that are hyperdetailed, scratchy/rough and are generally devoid of colour. The only colour found in these illustrations is in the art for ending F, where the queen is depicted with the player's blood dripping out of her mouth. Overall, I think the chosen art styles accurately capture the essence of each of the stories. 

09/15/24 - Audio

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to implement audio. Getting the sound in there via YouTube link isn’t the hard part. The hard part is getting it to play continuously while making sure the game can successfully replace the music when it needs to change. I think sound design is always an incredibly important role in setting the emotional tone in a game. Because of the dramatic emotional in my game, I felt that having a minimum of two different tracks was very important. I eventually figured out how to do all this (I may have had to ask ChatGPT for a little help) but it was far less straightforward than implementing the actual game mechanics, which I didn’t expect. At one point I got the sound of bees to overlap with my spooky music, but then eventually had to take this part out because it was giving me issues. Even after completing the game loop and returning to the title, the sound of bees continued to loop, so I eventually concluded that it would be easier to just have the sounds play after each other to avoid the issue. If I had more time I would probably try to fix this issue, but I have more important things to focus on for the time being. I managed to include 4 tracks total: the upbeat/relaxing theme, the sound of buzzing bees, the creepy music, and a bittersweet/sort of sad track that plays during ending B. Overall, I think my choices captured the intended emotions of the game well.

09/16/24 - Finishing touches

Bee Careful is finally done! I spent today editing my passages, making little changes and wrapping things up. The only main thing I did today was ensure that all my text was centered, get rid of the undo/go back option and try out a few different audio options. I'm pretty happy with the game. In general, I think the UI could definitely use some work, but with the short span of time I've had to throw my game together I think everything turned out great. Now I can finally post this all, go to sleep, and immediately start working on my next game.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the game!

-BP