Bee me
become a bee and collect nectar from flowers
become a bee and collect nectar from flowers
When my fisrtborn was one and a half years old, I started learning to code. I was writing the final exams pregnant with their sibling. After giving birth and taking care of them both for some months, I needed to go back on the keyboard. So I decided to built them a game!
Bee Me is a top-down 2D RPG made in GameMaker Studio 2. At first I was thinking of the classic Pokémon games we all grew up with. In our game you play as Beeatrice, a little bee living in a cozy hive, whose job is to fly out into the garden, collect nectar from flowers, and bring it back to fill the honeycomb cells.
The game was designed with a four-year-old in mind. I wanted it be a low stimulation activity, resisting of the adictive nature of most modern media. Every mechanic is simple and forgiving. But underneath that simplicity is a gentle educational loop: each day, a worker bee named Beely sends Beeatrice out with a color mission. "Bring me nectar from a purple flower today!" The mission word appears in its own color on screen, teaching color recognition through play.
As Beeatrice collects more nectar, she earns experience and levels up, unlocking a bigger nectar bag, which means less trips, more nectar, more cells filled.
There is a day and night cycle. When the day's work is done and all flowers have been collected, Beeatrice returns to her bedroom in the hive and goes to sleep. The screen fades to black. Good night. The flowers bloom again. A new mission begins.
I built this game while learning GMS2 from scratch, following the official tutorial. It is not the perfect game...yet. But it is a beginning of something better.
My children and I are already thinking of the next project!
