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It might not be scientifically accurate but Hive Time is a very sweet and relaxing little management sim. Disclosure: Cheese, the developer, is a contributor here on GOL.

Keep busy Bees, grow your hive, make some sweet honey and produce a new Queen before your current one dies of old age. That's mostly the aim of the game in Hive Time, with colourful visuals and a family friendly theme encased in a sublime soundtrack from Peter Silk it's quite lovely overall.

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Manage different bee roles in a totally scientifically inaccurate depiction of hive dynamics. Send Foragers out to find pollen and nectar, have Builders research new cell types, and ensure you have enough Beesitters to raise the next generation of bees.

Make interesting choices that affect the hive. Respond to wasp attacks, deal with outlaw slugs, or help a caterpillar realise a lifelong dream.

There's a nice bit of friendly humour sprinkled throughout it too. As you progress, your workers give you little messages, some of which are truly ridiculous puns on TV shows and Movies but I will admit this one made me laugh a good bit. Naughty bee.

It seems overly simple when you get going, but thankfully it does slowly expand as you research into a management and building sim that keeps you going for hours. At your own pace though, Hive Time doesn't rush you. Even though it's always against the clock to get a new Queen, you're given quite a long time to do so. Hive Time offers a unique take on the ways of Bee life, personally I found it very relaxing.

You can pick Hive Time up now only on itch.io. The suggested price is $10, but they've gone for a pay-what-you-want model so you could try before you buy, plus it means if you're totally broke you can enjoy it too.

As for the soundtrack, you can grab that here and 50% of the soundtrack proceeds go to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust charity.

It's also another game made with Godot Engine, good to see more using it out in the wild.

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18 comments

Purple Library Guy Dec 12, 2019
Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.
Purple Library Guy Dec 12, 2019
Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.

Probably something to do with the fact that 10.15 drops 32 bits support. And 10.14 was released on September 24, 2018 so it's not that old.
I always get mixed up with release numbers after .s not being decimals. I was imagining a sub-release sometime between 10.1 and 10.2, which would have been long ago, but of course that's not it.
BrazilianGamer Dec 12, 2019
Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.

Because Apple is more and more making it's platform unviable to game makers. Lots of bureaucracy and bad decisions along the way. The usual. Good for us though lol
DrMcCoy Dec 12, 2019
Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why.

Cheese wrote about that here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/regarding-mac-31349008
iiari Dec 12, 2019
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Has there been a sim game of sim games? Must.Sim.All.The.Things!
Cheeseness Dec 13, 2019
Aww cool ! And nice that the soundtrack is on bandcamp. Good showcase for Godot too. And finally Youtube is not acting up anymore. The art is really cute.

I hope the pay what you want model works out. :)

Thanks for the kind words.


Numbers seem positive so far. The average sale price is above $10. Itch doesn't show per-platform sales, but for downloads, Linux is currently at 40% :)
Cyril Dec 13, 2019
OK so I downloaded the game without paying to try it out, I launched a "new hive" directly without tutorial and for now... I played it like 2 hours.
Of course I didn't have enough time to get 600 jelly... the queen died. ^_^
I'll play it more seriously and with the tutorial next time, to be sure to not miss some feature etc.

But yeah very good game, so now I bought it. :)
14 Dec 13, 2019
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Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.

Probably something to do with the fact that 10.15 drops 32 bits support. And 10.14 was released on September 24, 2018 so it's not that old.
Exactly. Someone just told me about this problem and how they were going to downgrade their MacOS! It seemed absurd, but the person is a gamer and artist and can't go without a few of their most-used applications. Sounds to me like Mac might not be a solution anymore in this case. That would be terribly frustrating.
Cyril Dec 13, 2019
Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why.

Cheese wrote about that here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/regarding-mac-31349008

I read all this post and this is very interesting, the kind of thing that should be pinned everywhere.
Seriously I hate Apple for a long time but this post made it worst, thanks that's truly useful.
For me this company is worst than Microsoft in many aspects.


Last edited by Cyril on 13 December 2019 at 4:12 am UTC
Cheeseness Dec 13, 2019
OK so I downloaded the game without paying to try it out, I launched a "new hive" directly without tutorial and for now... I played it like 2 hours.
Of course I didn't have enough time to get 600 jelly... the queen died. ^_^
I'll play it more seriously and with the tutorial next time, to be sure to not miss some feature etc.

But yeah very good game, so now I bought it. :)
Glad to hear you're having fun! The game lets you continue playing if the queen dies (unless you've enabled "unforgiving game over").

If you haven't spotted it, the "activity" screen from the upgraded Throne Room can point you towards efficiency bottlenecks!

I'm also planning to add a way to review past tutorials without starting a new game down the track if that's helpful.
Philadelphus Dec 13, 2019
Any chance of this coming to Steam at all in the near-ish future? :)
Cheeseness Dec 13, 2019
Any chance of this coming to Steam at all in the near-ish future? :)
Unlikely. For this project, I am committed to pay-what-you-want pricing and that is not an option that Steam offers.

For what it's worth, I have verified that it runs and the Steam overlay works when launched through Steam as a non-Steam game.
Cyril Dec 13, 2019
Sorry to be a bit off topic but since the Cheeseness's post, I just noticed that a lot of games are now missing macOS releases on GOG.com. I noticed it when searching in the winter sales and got surprised to see for some games, just the Windows and the Linux icons, while I clearly know for some that a macOS version exist.
Apparently on Steam it's not the case, it just display a warning about it.

But damn... that's a serious issue for the Apple environment! :O
Are they shoot themselves in the foot (I mean not with a revolver, but with a rocket launcher), aren't they?
14 Dec 14, 2019
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Huh, I read the blog. I didn't know MacOS was getting that controlled. There's something to be said for being different and sticking to it. And Apple seems like they don't care about gaming or the corporate world. I don't know... seems like their targeted audience is getting smaller and smaller. And their hardware is stale on all fronts to boot. I wouldn't be betting on them right now.
Sir_Diealot Dec 14, 2019
Interesting asterisk on the systems supported. It supports MacOS, but only "10.14 or older". I've never seen that before; I wonder why. That's actually pretty old as far as I can tell. Not that it matters to us, but it made me curious.

10.15 released a month or so ago and Apple "usually" supports the three most recent releases. Yes, the great Apple everyone seems look up and to aspire to doesn't even have a proper release or support plan. I've been using it for a few months at work now and to me it smells more like a polished turd.
They do make developers life increasingly difficult. OpenGL hasn't been updated in ages and will get dropped in favor of their proprietary API, they dropped 32 bit support and introduce increasingly obnoxious yet useless "notarization".
It's what they've been doing all along, but they are consequent now and pull tight the thumb screws for developers as well. You either buy in or you are out.

I did a bit of testing on Hive Time and it's a cute little management game, fun for a couple hours at least until you have figured out how to succeed. Definitely listen in on the soundtrack, which is actually released under CC BY-NC-SA!
Philadelphus Dec 15, 2019
Unlikely. For this project, I am committed to pay-what-you-want pricing and that is not an option that Steam offers.

For what it's worth, I have verified that it runs and the Steam overlay works when launched through Steam as a non-Steam game.
Fair enough, I can respect that. Thanks for the info. :)
Cheeseness Dec 15, 2019
Fair enough, I can respect that. Thanks for the info. :)
No probs!

The other nice thing (from my perspective) is that Itch allows people to buy, download, and play the game without making an account, so when I distribute on Itch, I'm not asking people to commit to using another platform.


Last edited by Cheeseness on 15 December 2019 at 10:34 am UTC
Philadelphus Dec 17, 2019
No probs!

The other nice thing (from my perspective) is that Itch allows people to buy, download, and play the game without making an account, so when I distribute on Itch, I'm not asking people to commit to using another platform.
Ah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. I'll have to check it out.
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