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[rozza]

Bees Won't Exist
A friendly bee game that never gets weird, obviously

Possibly a bit late for this because we're fairly far into development, but we're still adding new content and tweaking stuff and would love feedback on what we already have! I'll also be updating this as we add more stuff to the game and hopefully we'll have a playable demo soon  
We're a student team and this is actually our first full game together.


Bees Won't Exist is a fast paced hack 'n' slash game with a friendly aesthetic but a creepy twist (think the kind of thing as in Don't Hug Me I'm Scared)



The game is set in a dystopian alternate reality where giant bee creatures have taken over the world and human civilization, and your job is to stop them! Gameplay focuses on the combat with the player having three main abilities: dash attack, strong attack and dodge.

Dash attack propels the player forward until they hit an enemy, and multiple dashes can be chained together in quick succession until they miss an enemy, in which case they are stunned for a short moment.



Strong attack doesn't propel the player forward as much, is slower, but has a wider area of effect.



Dodge moves the player forward a shorter distance than the dash attack but has no stun effect, so can be used to quickly move around the game.



As the player explores they are able to activate switches to raise and lower the level of honey pools, which give them access to more areas in the game.


The game is based on Unity and we spent quite a while trying to find a good looking toon shader. Eventually we ended up taking the standard Unity 5 PBR shader and modifying the deferred lighting pass to create more of a cel-shaded effect as per this blog post: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidLeon/20150702/247602/NextGen_Cel_Shading_in_Unity_5.php. The outlines are just an edge detection post-effect that runs a sobel filter on the normals and the depth of all objects.

Pretty much all the levels are hex-tile based and were created using a tile editor I made that allows you to just paint hex tiles in the Unity scene editor, automatically combining them into chunks for each material type to optimize draw calls. Eventually I plan on putting that code up on GitHub so I'll probably also post here when I do.

[Valar05]

It looks quite nice!  How much trouble was it to implement that deferred lighting hack?  I had followed that same article a while ago, but was unable to to get it to work (though I no longer remember the issue I had).  Is the main benefit of that over something like the Toon Shader in the standard assets package the ability to use normal/pbr maps?

[Davi Vasc]

That first screenshot looks awesome, love the vibrant colors.

The three moves seem to be pretty well balanced too. At first I thought people would just abuse the dash attack, but after considering the stun effect I think all the moves are pretty even, nice work on that.

[rozza]

Yeah, the instructions on that link for the cel shading don't seem to work with the latest version of Unity so it took a bit of fiddling around to get it to work. I've put our version of the Unity deferred shader that does the cel shading on GitHub here if you'd like to have a look at it: https://gist.github.com/RoryDungan/322e53305aec352f74a7ecfc5a7bde0d.

Basically the only real change is on line 70 where it clamps the value to 0 or 1.

I'm still not 100% happy with that though because I'd really like it if it could be stepped rather than just either light or dark. It would also be good to have a way to apply different effects to different objects, although from what I've read elsewhere online that would require modifying the layout of the G-buffer to make room for the extra info that needs to get passed in to the deferred lighting pass.

[rozza]

I'm pretty happy with the balance between the dash and dodge. Players do tend to end up spamming dodge to move around quite a bit but I think that's fine since it still feels pretty natural as a fast way to move around and is similar to a lot of other hack 'n' slash games like Hyper light Drifter. The only thing I'd like to change is that while the stun on the end of the dash attack makes sense from a gameplay perspective it still looks weird because the character basically just stops for no apparent reason, so I think we're going to change the animation for that to more of a stumble forwards.

[SolS]

I love the art and the story! And the gameplay looks great too! Good luck with this