Improve My Game Jam 26

I made Flicky Bee on a whim for Mini Jam 128. I didn't really have much attachment to it, but I was waiting in an office and had the test build on my phone and found it kind of nice. I saw the possibility of it being a nice experience, especially on app stores. Then I encountered "Improve My Game Jam" and well, it lined up rather perfect.

Flicky Bee's Scores on Mini Jam 128 were pretty bad. It had very few ratings which affected the overall score, but the actual ratings themselves were more like 3 out of 5 stars. Either way, it absolutely has space to improve on, and I had ideas while developing it but ran out of time. I'm going to casually work on it and see what happens!

Things I originally wanted:

• Obstacles, Rocks or Pillars
• Enemy Drones, Dragon Fly in a circle, or Frogs with Tongues darting in a line
• Smaller Harder to hit Flowers
• Visual Effect of the Bee Rising and getting flicked off the flower
• Visual Effect of the Flower Bending as the player is about to flick the bee.
• Lives, or maybe Hit Points
• Visuals for the Bee moving it's wings or even an idle animation

I did learn a little bit from the comments on the Mini Jam submission, mainly that people seemed to have a hard time dealing with the timer. Ultimately the game doesn't need the timer, it was added to provide a backbone of tension since the challenge of flicking to the next flower is trivial. However if I add obstacles, then I could replace the timer with Health Points instead. Most likely Health Blocks, like a number of hits, rather than a percent bar. This post is in Draft, but I'll add to it and eventually publish.

Changes, as they Happen.

1. Remove the On Screen Notifs from the grass patches. HTML export didn't acknowledge them properly, so the gray background would quickly reveal itself.
2. Added Directional Light and enabled Shadows.
3. Fixed the Grass Patches to use the Position of the Camera as a reference for how to reposition themselves
4. Added more Mesh Detail and a Texture to the Grass Patches
5. Added the Flight and Rest Animations to the Bee
6. Added better movement and speed
7. Added Flower Visual of bending and flicking the bee
8. Added in a few patterns of Bricks to function as obstacles.
9. Changed the Bee to use a KinematicBody now called PlayerBody.
10. Added in Large Grass on the sides of the main play area for widescreen play.
11. Changed the way Flight depletes and affects the Bee flying.
12. Added in the Frog Obstacle, getting struck by it reduces the timer available.
13. Added in Help Button on Intro, as well as Music and SFX toggle.

March 30th, 6 Hours until submission ends...

Well this was fun! I think I'm going to put in just a couple more weeks into this project and post it on App Stores for free. I have developer accounts on Google and Apple already for another project anyway. Why not make some people happy by flicking around a bee.

Source Code is available on my github
https://github.com/LettucePie/flicky_bee

For those curious you can flip through the commits to see how the game started.