Madeline Vokovitch
H.I.V.E
The insect world isn’t easy; it takes strong leaders and careful decisions for a colony to grow and thrive. Build and rule your hive as the Queen Bee, manage resources and workers, fend off attacks, and trade with other colonies. Become a ruthless hornet queen or gentle ladybug as you expand your civilization across the lands.
Moodboard & Design
Narrative: The insect world isn’t easy; it takes strong leaders and careful decisions for a colony to grow and thrive. Build and rule your hive as the Queen Bee, manage resources and workers, fend off attacks, and trade with other colonies. Become a ruthless hornet queen or gentle ladybug as you expand your civilization across the lands.
Visual style: Renaissance romanticism, Geometric patterns, Nature influence.
Genre: Resource management / Civ builder / Strategy
Game Loop: Players represent a leader from an insect nation of choice. i.e., Bees. Starting with a small hive it’s up to the player to build, gather, and defend their base in real time.
Research on Real Bee behavior
There are over 20,000 known bee species in the world, and 4,000 of them are native to the United States. Bees are found on every continent except for Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. They feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae.
Honeybees communicate by the waggle dance, in which a worker indicates the location of a food source to other workers in the hive. Bees can recognize a desired compass direction in three different ways: by the sun, by the polarization pattern of the blue sky, and by the earth's magnetic field. Bees navigate using spatial memory with a "rich, map-like organization".
Achievements
When creating the achievements I wanted to represent a variety of potential play styles with some being more offensive and others resourceful, there were originally 8 achievement ideas but I narrowed it down to the top 5 most bee related. It was important they related to both in-game actions and the habits seen in nature.
Houses
The game concept initially has many more insect factions. Still, I chose to focus on 3 relative to bee types, ones that would visually and symbolically represent the typical play styles found in civilization games. The Honey hive represents a monarchy, the Bunble hive for the people, and the hornets are invaders. The banner's style is reminiscent of hand-painted works found in games like Dragon Age and Civilization 5. I chose to utilize a gamit mask when creating my color pallet, this was to accentuate the affinity style found in period paintings.
