Hey everyone! Before we dive into today’s VV Eekly Update, I have a big announcement!
Playtesting is open!
Vyn and Verdan is now available on Steam for a small group of playtesters. If you are interested, please reach out to me! There’s still many bugs and the game is not nearly finished, but you can try it out! (with a friend, of course)
Next week, I’ll talk about the roadmap to release and what I’ll be planning on working on. Of course, all of those features on the roadmap will be gradually released to playtesters to test.
For this week though, let’s talk about our next class of enemies…
Bees
Do you know that feeling when you’re walking through some flowers and there are some bees floating around and oh no you’re wearing your favorite floral shirt or your favorite brightly colored pants or maybe you just smell funny good to bees and oh NO the bees are chasing you around and OH NO they won’t STOP and…
Yes, that’s exactly the bee experience we’re looking for.
As mentioned in VV Eekly Update #4 – Beetles, the design mantra is “Challenge through coordination.” This is what will make the game fun and is the real “meat” of the content. Hopefully, bees will encourage that as well! Bees are the next class of melee enemies after beetles, intended to be similar to but harder than beetles.
First, here are the bumbling bees. These bees are the largest variety! They’ve grown up, but it turns out that growing up is hard, confusing, and a tad tiring. They move in short, somewhat misguided bursts of energy, but they always move towards their goal (of stinging you to death).
They’re not particularly hard to out-range, but the speed at which they move and the sheer volume of their pointy ends makes it so dodging close-range is quite difficult. By the time players get to these bees, they should be used to the usual “one of us baits the bees’ attacks while the other attacks from behind” gameplay, but the range, size, and frequency of bee attacks asks players to tighten up how they bait.
Blind bees are the second variety of bees. They meander towards the player until they get in sight, and then they CHARGE! If you remember, this is quite similar to the charging beetle, but the difference is that these will follow you around. Even though they’re blind, they can follow by scent quite well…
Once again, these shouldn’t be difficult to handle once you get the hang of them. The difficulty should be that the charge only occurs in short-range distances, and short-range charges are both difficult to predict and difficult to bait. They also damage themselves when they sting you!
Buzzing bees are the last and smallest variety of bees. These are the true classic kinds of bees you encounter in real life. They usually mind their own business, swarming around and doing their thing… then you get close, and you’re irresistible. They still don’t really mean you any harm, but sometimes they’ll accidentally sting you anyway. Whoops!
By themselves, a single buzzing bee is not threatening whatsoever. However, there’s no way you ever see a single buzzing bee by itself! The sheer chaos of the bees provides the fun. Don’t get stung!
Here’s the bees all together! What great fun, and not reminiscent of bees being terrifying when I was younger…
By the way, what do you think those statues are? One seems to be counting down! Stay tuned to find out.
If you have any comments about bees or want to participate in playtesting, buzz on over to the Discord and be sure to wax eloquent there!