Honey Hills: Educational Beekeeping Game

Development Summary:

• Engine: Unity

• Development Time: 3 week

• Platform: PC

• Genre: 2D, Farming Simulator, RPG

Design Goals:

• Create a game that teaches players the basics of Beekeeping

• Provide users examples of real life Beekeeping scenarios

• Give players the opportunity to easily delve deeper into certain aspects of Beekeeping

• Theory-craft various systems that would be required to make the project a viable teaching tool

• Offer a simplified farming simulator that pulls players in with a combination of overarching plot and simple, short narratives

Development Summary:

Gathering Information:

A few weeks ago, I was challenged by a studio, that will remain nameless, to develop a game about Bees. It could cover any topic as long as it focused on some aspect of bees. Having always been curious about beekeeping, I felt it best to channel that curiosity and explore the fascinating world of beekeeping. There was just one problem, at the time I was terrified of bees. After telling this to the design lead, he even offered to change the topic for my benefit. However, I knew that a client would never be so gracious, so I gritted my teeth and made plans to visit an Apiary, or Honey Farm.

Upon my visit to the Apiary, I met with the keeper and talked with him for several hours. Talking exhaustive notes on various topics of beekeeping ranging from:

• Seasonal behaviors of bees

• When do keepers harvest honey and how much

• Structure of a traditional beekeeping hive

• How to identify healthy verse unhealthy hives

• How to use a smoker, beebrush, Supers, scrappers and other various tools

• The Beekeeping Calendar

• How to prepare the hives for winter

And dozens of other topics that I never would have known were important without the keeper’s help. I then turned to research and developed a catalogue of sources and information I could pull from in order to better refine my ideas. Ultimately, I realized that beekeeping in many ways is much like farming any other type of animal. Each hive has its own personality, needs, and desires and a successful harvest is determined by how well the keeper handles the year-round cycle of beekeeping. With this in mind, I began to sketch and idea for a game that had a year cycle where players could proceed through an entire year, work with hives, growing their apiary, and keeping their hives healthy and safe. It did not take long for me to realize that the general structure of Stardew Valley would work very well for the idea I wanted to pursue. And while, initially, I was against the idea of borrowing so heavily from Stardew Valley, I took a look at the numbers and realized that there was a very strong market for a farming, simulator title. As such, I started to put together the pieces for Honey Hills, a Beekeeping-centric Farming Simulator.

Major Systems:

At the core of Honey Hills, there are several major systems that either help to make the game a realistic beekeeping experience or works to provide a little bit of levity and fun. The major systems are as follows:

• Beekeeping Tutorial

• Beehive Attributes and Behaviors

• Degradation, Disease, and Infestation

• Fast-Facts

• Seasons and the Beekeeping Calendar

• Narrative

• Orders, Relationship, and Reputation

• Farming Simulator

• Assessment Methods

Beekeeping Tutorial:

At its core, Honey Hills is about teaching players the basics of beekeeping so that they can decide whether or not they want to pursue beekeeping and if so at what level. As such, the controls and tutorial are designed to be a simple and easy as possible for people to get into and use. W,A,S,D, control the players movement while mouse clicking controls everything else. I even proposed the idea of allowing players to click where they wanted to move, to insure that players have as minimal barrier to entry as possible. Then comes the tutorial which is designed to walk the player through all the basics of beekeeping one step at a time. The player starts the game with two hives, one that is sickly and one that is healthy, and a run down Apiary. Over the next two in game weeks, the player will learn from Thomas, the owner of the Apiary, about various aspects of beekeeping ranging from identifying hive structure, how to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy hives, how and when to use various beekeeping tools, how and when to extract honey, and plenty more. To the right, you can see the key I created to exhibit some of the different bees, cells, and other important information and player would need to understand.

Beehive Attributes and Behaviors:

While researching with the beekeeper, it became apparent to me that one do the key aspects of beekeeping that so many people seem to ignore is that bee hives can have a personality. Some may have a preference for a particular plant, some may want to swarm (split a hive in half and make their own hive) even if it would kill the colony, and some may take little provocation to start attacking while other hives might have higher thresholds. This means that no two beekeepers are ever going to have the same experience. As such, I decided to theorize a simple A.I. system that would subtly alter a hive’s personality based on two behaviors. First I started by defining the major attributes of each hive which would be as follows: Aggression, Creation, Reach, and Survival. Aggression controls the hive’s innate defensive capabilities. Creation dictates both how quickly a hive grows its brood and the quality and quantity of honey created. Reach determines how far the workers go out into the world. Survival controls how well a hive can handle diseases or infestations and how well they insulate in winter. To start off with, all four attributes would have a starting value of 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. With these attributes defined, I decided that each hive would, upon its creation, be given two behaviors that would augment the attributes and therefore the A.I. that would run each hive. Certain behaviors were given limiters to insure that certain combinations could not occur and lead to boring or strange combinations such as Omnivore/Specialist or Paranoid/Mild. With behaviors in play, each hive would randomly recieve two of these from a list, which then augments the attributes for a hive’s A.I. This leads to hives that play distinctly differently from one hive to the next. This forces players to adapt their apiary and their approach to their hives, much like how they would need to do if they decided to become beekeepers in real life.

Degradation, Disease, and Infestation:

Two of the biggest threats to beehives are disease and infestation. If either of these threats can become fully established inside a hive, then it will more than likely spell death for the entire hive. Thankfully, most diseases and infestations only gain a chance of success if a hive is already weak in some way such as, the hive was attacked, the hive lost too many workers during winter, or the queen is too old and has not created a replacement yet. As I wanted the game to be as educational as possible, I wanted players to be able to see and interact with disease and infestations so that if any of the players decided to become beekeepers in real life, they would have the skills necessary to deal with it appropriately. This is why I developed the degradation system.

In brief, the Degradation System slowly chips away at a hive’s health until it becomes susceptible to disease. The amount of which a hive degrades is known as its degradation factor and can be influenced by various factors such as environment, age of the queen, and other smaller factors. Each hive starts at 100 health and at the end of every in-game day, the hive’s degradation factor removes a chunk of health from the hive. Once a hive reaches 70 health, then the system will start rolling a random number each day between 1 and 90 for disease or infestations. If the number is equal to or less than the hive’s health, nothing happens. If the number is higher than the hive’s health, then it obtains a random disease or infestations. Players must then identify the disease or infestation. This will be done by showing various dead cells, collection of dead bees, and disorganization of the cells in the frames, and (in the case of infestation) the appearance of the invaders on the frames.

Once a hive obtains a disease or infestation, the player can go into town and talk with a shopkeeper to purchase a Cure All Disease or Cure All Infestation. In order to test player knowledge, the player must first describe the problem to the shopkeep, then make a guess of what the hive might have. If they get it right, the shopkeep offers the treatment at a discount. If the player is wrong, the shopkeep still provides the medicine, but at full price. Once treated, the Hive will stop producing honey and instead rebuild its health at the end of each day equal to its creation attribute.

Fast-Facts:

While designing this game, I knew I wanted to provide players who wanted to go deeper a chance to learn more than what could be provided by an NPC dialogue. As such, I decided to create the fast facts system. Seen in the image to the right, the idea would be that as a player talks with a character, occasionally key words will pop up in red that players can choose to click on. Mousing over the word simply provides the players a small dialogue box that offers a simple, short definition of the word. Clicking on the word, the player can then access a lengthier wiki page that includes images, more in-depth information, and even links to related topics. Lastly, right clicking would play a short sound file, informing players how exactly to pronounce the word or phrase.

One initial critique I recieved from the client concerning this idea was that it seemed that this system would only be truly beneficial to those players who were pretty much already going to become beekeepers anyway. There was no incentive for normal, everyday players to delve into these pages to any great degree. My initial counter to that idea was to maybe add in a secret “Knowledge” Buff that would increase a player’s honey creation rate. That said, I quickly realized this only created a new problem and still did not incentivize learning. If players ever learned of this secret :Knowledge” buff, then many players would just click through the entire library of fast-facts just to get the buff and not worry about actually reading the information. As such, I settled on some of the pages have in-game tips or tricks that if players decided to apply would intately help their hives be slightly more productive or help them to alter their apiary in other more beneficial areas. For example, a game tip might read, “Hey, did you know apple trees tend to need a lot of water in order to produce great fruit. Be sure to plant them near water.” If players then planted their apple trees near water, the trees would grow faster and allow players to produce specialty apple honey sooner.

Seasons and Beekeeping Calendar:

One of the driving forces behind making the game a year round experience was the idea of the Beekeeper’s Calendar. Beehives change and adapt quite radically throughout the year, with specific types of worker bees begin born at certain times of the year in order to better prepare for the hive’s future. And with the changing seasons, the bee keeper’s job changes as well. Spring sees the beekeeper adding food to the hive to encourage growth while also constantly checking for mites and disease. Summer sees keepers actually collecting honey while still keeping an eye out for disease and pests. This is also when players would be processing their honey and getting it ready to sell. During fall, keepers should tapper off their honey collection and insure that hives have enough honey to get them through the winter and may even help to winterize the hive by adding external insulation. Winter, no real beekeeping is done and instead focuses more on just getting prepared for next year. This yearly cycle reminded me a lot of Stardew Valley and other farming simulator games as beekeeping is essentially bee farming. With this idea as a core, I quickly saw a new potential market and quickly set to work developing the rest of Honey Hills.

Narrative:

To act as a framework in which to set the player’s actions, I decided to develop a simple, overarching narrative that would provide players some context for their actions while subtly providing some underlying themes. In short, the player is a recent hire of Farmer Thomas, an elderly farmer whose wife, Elena, has been the mayor of the town for many years. However, recently Elena has fallen ill and Thomas has decided to take her to the nearby city for medical treatment. He then offers the player a deal, if the player can either produce four bottles of high quality honey within three years time, Thomas will give the player the apiary. If the player cannot do this, Thomas will have to sell the farm to Desoto, a corporation that is slowly taking over the area. The player then sees their apiary for the first time, completes the tutorial, and Thomas leaves promising to provide bi-weekly checkups. Once the player rebuilds the apiary and recuperates their two initial hives, one morning they will meet Mr. Smide, the local representative of Desoto who wishes to buy their bees so they can be trucked all over the country. Before the player can respond, the local sheriff named Jethrow will chase Mr. Smide off. Jethrow will then explain how the town was doing fine for years, then Desoto came in and started undercutting all the local businesses, killing off local businesses and taking over the town’s supply lines. Many locals banded together to boycott Desoto, but with Elena gone, the town’s resolve is wavering and Jethrow feels that if one more person sells out to Desoto, then the town will collapse. The player then proceeds through the rest of the game, filling orders, growing their apiary, getting to know the locals. Either by buying the apiary outright or by producing the three bottles of honey, the player secures the apiary and slowly becomes Honey Hills’s new symbol of hope and resistance against Desoto before finally shoving the corporation out of Honey Hills for good.

In many ways, this narrative reflects the ideas of beekeeping in that Honey Hills is a hive, a human hive whose queen has grown old and can no longer lead effectively. The player can then come in and through do diligence, proper study, and hard work, help to turn the hive around and fight off the infestation that is the Desoto Corporation and keep Honey Hills from collapsing. It is a simple narrative in many ways, but it does a lot to frame the player’s actions and allows the player to be a hero, by simply being a good beekeeper.

Orders, Relationships, and Reputation:

Once the player has their apiary up and running and has started to collect honey, what exactly are they supposed to do. In Honey Hills there are several things players can do with their honey ranging from: selling at the farmer’s market, filling orders, and building relationships. Players can just sell their honey at the local Farmer’s Market. This serves two purposes: 1) Gets the player some initial income to start making upgrades to the Apiary 2) Brings the player into contact with the people of Honey Hills so they can interact. Through these interactions, players will receive orders. Orders will have a due date and an amount of honey, sometimes a specific type of honey. Players will need to gauge if their bees will be able to fill the order by the due date, much like how a real beekeeper would need to. The player can also negotiate each order, but their is a limit to what they can change. In many ways, it is better for a player to not take an order rather than take an order and fail to fill it as failing will negatively impact the player’s relationship and reputation.

Filling a customer’s order and doing certain activities for the NPC in question are some of the best ways to build up a relationship with the characters which in turn build’s the player’s reputation in the town. As players raise their reputation and relationship status, they will earn discounts at local shops, the chance to romance certain characters, but most importantly, with a high enough reputation, characters will occasionally offer up their plots of land for the player to use to expand their apiary, leading to more revenue sources. Players can then become a beekeeper for hire, growing their business and reputation all the more, much how like a real life beekeeper slowly grows their reputation in their local community.

Assessment Methods:

The ultimate goal of Honey Hills is to teach users the basics of beekeeping and help them in some way to decide if they want to pursue becoming a beekeeper in real life. That is why the game works so hard to be a relatively realistic simulation of beekeeping. Sure the farming simulator additions are there, but they serve to help make the experience more gamey, and draw in other players who might otherwise ignore the title. As such, because of its realistic core, the ultimate assessment method will be the player’s own success within the game. If a player as mastered the basics of beekeeping, can identify healthy and unhealthy hives, deal with diseases and infestations properly, can abide by the beekeeper’s calendar, and successful grow their dying apiary into a thriving business, then that should prove the player has reached the goal of being at least an amateur beekeeper.

In order to help reach these goals, there are two additional modes of assessment. The first are the bi-weekly checkups from Thomas. Every two weeks, the player will wake to a note on their refrigerator, similar to the one on the right, that congratulates the player on answering certain issues, offers up some worries about certain hives, and even recommends certain actions the player can take. All of this helps to insure the player catches all the necessary information, has landmarks to reference back to, and a safety net should they just accidentally miss something important. Additionally, at the end of every year the player will receive a review of their in-game year from Thomas. This document will track how many hives they have, how happy and healthy they were kept on average, how well they survived the winter, and other feedback.  This year-in-review would help players figure out what they need to focus on more, what they might have missed or forgotten, and give some direction on how they can improve for the upcoming year.

The second form of assessment is a simple final quiz. With this quiz, players have their knowledge tested one final time in order to see if there are any major areas the player might want to look over and review. Based on their final score, players can receive links to specific topics, recommended books, and slides of in-game pictures showing relevant information. Even if the player scores one hundred percent, they should be congratulated, but also urged to seek out local apiaries and beekeepers so they can learn about their area’s specific needs and issues and gain real world experience.

Conclusion:

The client approved of my design in many ways, and while I am curious if the design will ever see production, I have to say I am still proud of the work I put into this game design document. Thanks to my time at Triseum, I honestly believe that there is a place for these types of educational games in our modern world. The truth is, we love to learn. We are naturally and constantly want to know what ifs, or what’s behind the corner, or what lies just beyond the horizon. And I believe that as long as that educational material is presented in a well-designed format as opposed to just a math worksheet with the occasional explosion, there will always be a market of curious people, ready to learn and pickup something new.