@detox: a couple levels (at least one…) has an ‘exterminator’ – its a human dressed in all white that shoots big white clouds of anti-bee spray and never runs from the bees.

I like the triangle bee-type selector.

There are many possibilities of fun stuff you could add – I’m not a big RTS fan but this one could be pretty fun and unique. Just expand on the bee theme

The main problem in an infinite-resource style RTS like this is encouraging expansion. In this game, there is no real reason to leave the hive until you build up the uber-bee army and are going to win the game anyway. You need to incorporate some reason to actually want to leave the hive and wander around; games like Total Annihilation solve this by making the most powerful resource creating buildings very expensive and adding map-specific control points that will help you during the mid-game (geothermal vents), as well as supplimentary resources scattered around the map that you can mine for a boost (wreckage and ore rocks). Alternatively, you could go for a more traditional limited-resource scheme and just place (exhaustable) resources on the map.

Warcraft 3 has an interesting take on this; the random monsters scattered around the map give you XP and let you level up your hero. It would be cool (and would encourage the kind of play you want to see) if killing the humans actually did something for you rather than just being a goal required to finish the level. This is a mechanic that’s been used in some realtime games (Warcraft 3, Sacrifice) but not nearly enough for my liking. In most RTSes you end up leveling up just by waiting for your ‘scientists’ (or whatever) to research more stuff. This is boring to me and encourages Starcraft-ian clickfests.

The main thing you want to discourage is players just sitting there producing more and more resources until they can storm the map and win by default. The more map-based incentives you have out there that makes it desirable (and nessicary) to stop guarding the base, the more fun it will be imo.

Lol. It MIGHT work now – who knows though.

you’re gonna wanna kill me, but:

C:\ldgames\bees-xp>bees
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “bees.py”, line 1602, in
File “bees.py”, line 45, in __init__
File “MUA\Core.pyc”, line 196, in __call__
File “MUA\View\View2D\View2D.pyc”, line 104, in __init__
File “bees.py”, line 63, in _setup
File “rabbyt\sprites.pyc”, line 98, in __init__
File “rabbyt\sprites.pyc”, line 122, in _set_texture
File “rabbyt\__init__.pyc”, line 192, in autodetect_load_texture
File “rabbyt\__init__.pyc”, line 154, in pyglet_load_texture
File “pyglet\image\__init__.pyc”, line 176, in load
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘.\\images\\beeswarm.jpg’

FYI – it isn’t enough to just add the vista msvcrt.dll to the mix (and probably not legal anyway). To make it work I had to go to an XP machine, downgrade the pyopengl, and re-package the exe.

Google says its because XP and Vista don’t play nice together. I’ll find an XP box and build it there as soon as I can.

Am I doing something wrong?