It’s now half way through week 3 of Dare to be Digital, and although progress has slowed slightly as we focus on refining our level, things are still coming along nicely.

Although the core gameplay remains the same (swarming, the abilities of various bee classes) we’ve made some huge changes to our level. It’s now far more focussed on platforming and simple obstacles, rather than obscure puzzles, and balanced between the strengths of each type of bee. The gesture controls are working well, allowing all bee actions to be based on circling an object (for example to select some pollen to pick up) or drawing a line (for example to throw a rock in a particular direction), making it fairly easy to interact with objects even when they are moving or quite small, and would have been difficult to click.

Despite a few issues we’ve had with textures, animations and shaders, we’re getting a lot more art assets into the game to replace some horrific coder art which Ian and I added. On the advice of our mentors, we have also made some adjustments to our group plane and camera making the level far more fluid. There are a lot of improvements still to be made but we’re focussing on prioritising each feature correctly, so hopefully we’ll get through all of the most important ones.