Sergey Balanin 🐝

My function handling ALL edge cases between player inventory and building drag and drop interactions has reached its ULTIMATE FORM!
Waiting for me to do a cleanup?

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Today I'm pushing further into the new gameplay loop! 🐝 My game will feature a bee hotel where you can release bees back into the wild to restore populations of specific species. For now, I've made a blocky prototype so you can at least place it down!

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Congrats!

Hey! Long time no game-dev updates, huh? Right now I'm knee-deep in the building system structures finally cost resources to place, AND you get refunds when destroying them!

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Still gotta add stack counters and descriptions. Oh, and I’m still debating whether to cap items per slot haven’t really dug into storage mechanics yet!

Nailed full item output from the centrifuge today! Now you can actually spot ’em in the items tab! Zero proper icons yet though, so everything’s just sporting these shiny star placeholders ⭐️⭐️⭐️

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Hooray! Someone just became my milestone wishlist remover! 🎉🎉🎉

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Day 149 of dev streak! Still polishing the inventory now pagination and selection highlights work perfectly when switching between Bee and Frame tabs! 💅💅💅

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Just wrapped up the player-frame interaction loop in the hive! Now we’ve got this slick animation for inserting frames right before closing the hive lid! 🐝✨

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Today I learned that Unreal's Select node calculate ALL input nodes... 💀💀💀

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Hive covers can now be closed! Tried using Gameplay Tags for this turned out pretty sleek! Only downside: realized mid-process that I wanted to rename them, and it's non-trivial to change. So... better guess tag names right on the first try!

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Decided to animate the cover opening using splines... what could possibly go wrong? 🙃

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The frame info UI doesn’t update live yet though, so I’m stuck wiggling my mouse over them like crazy to refresh it!
Code’s already a scary spaghetti mess — might have to refactor this pasta monster in C++ later xD

Just implemented a super rough draft of bee frame filling in the hive! Currently, it works like this: each bee picks a free frame and fills it by a % based on their speed value. Every bee in the hive does this independently.

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Frame progress continues! Got the UI to display live data from frames now For colors, I just plugged in the main bee color as a placeholder I'll add proper colors when I make a custom icon later. Next up: finally writing the logic to actually fill these frames!

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As a test, I set hives to spawn 3 to 6 cells randomly wanted to see how it’d look visually.

Decided to tweak the hive frame UI some more ended up settling on a cleaner approach that feels much nicer!
Also made cells generate dynamically at runtime with proper spacing based on cell index!

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Well, looks like some loop is finally closed! Today I made frames load directly into the centrifuge from the inventory!

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Still need to figure out how to spawn frames without causing mischief in build mode, since the hive now thinks it’s overlapping with them! Oh, and apparently child actors don’t auto-delete with the parent object, so… more custom logic incoming. Fun times!

Started working on the new hive model! Of course, I didn’t export it correctly on the first try had to wrestle with it for a bit! Temporarily disabled hive collision and set up frame spawning. This is the current WIP state.

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Time to move on to other tasks at last!

Today I'm wrapping up frame animations for the centrifuge! Finally covered all edge cases for inserting/removing frames. Everything works like a charm now! I also moved the frame model's pivot to its center I'll need clean scaling for it anyway.

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Felt kinda burnt out today, but still pushed through and made a stand for the centrifuges! Reimported it with corrected orientation did the same for the hive too. Also dumped the frames into the centrifuge just to see how it looks visually.

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Thx for the feedback!!! Very beautiful bees!

Yea! And you can breed different species!
Here some trailer
bsky.app/profile/serg...

I went all out on details a single frame has half the polycount of the entire box 🤣
Planning to start with 3 frames per hive, but building it to support up to 6 later!

I also researched real-world frame sizes and found a standard.
Ended up adjusting both the hive and centrifuge to fit those frames. So far, I’ve only finished the frames and tweaked the hive’s top box. Just look at these frames!

Today I dove deep into Blender modeling! Decided to model the hive interior (where frames sit) + the frames themselves. While figuring out dimensions, I realized the frame sizes for the hive and centrifuge didn’t match.

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Ooops

Today I made the centrifuge baskets spin when you turn the crank handle! Looks and feels really smooth! I'm also thinking about adding a brake mechanism when rotating counter-clockwise.

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