Hey friends! Some good progress on the 3.0 this month, finally taking a huge bite out of all the coral related mechanics (wouldn't recommend, tastes awful) This post will contain spoilers of 3.0 content. [hr][/hr]

Night On The Tiles

So where we'd left off we had finished fishing and added Captain, Skipper's dad, along with a bunch of cute fishing themed decoration items. This meant it was time to move onto 2nd of the three areas of this update - coral reefs. I had already sketched out a lot of the coral stuff a long time ago, but it was time for a quick refresher on what was needed and to get my head into the zone for the new mechanics.
the scaffolds are used to regrow dead coral regions First up was getting the coral into the game - my quick dirty hack idea was to make them into floor tiles (like the wood tiles you can place). This would mean they could act like pier tiles for object placement, and tie in nicely with a lot of other tile based stuff that already existed.
captain peepin The dark blue tiles are "dying" coral which needs to be restored. Restoring all the dying coral restores the reef, and flowers/flora bloom allowing you access to the butterflies and solitary bees that make their home in the reefs. [hr][/hr]

Personal Chemistry

First you need to collect coral slithers (gently), which you can then put in a coral tank where you control the environment to make sure the coral is comfortable and can grow big and strong. This uses acid+alkali (first bought from bumblemore, then later from bee products), and salt!
yea now there's a chemistry lesson to go with the biology ones fight me Once you've grown your new coral pieces, you can place scaffolds for them to sit in. The action of nearby coral bees will slowly help the new coral grow and restore the dying coral underneath it.
sped up for GIF purposes! It's a slow process overall, as it's meant to be something you do alongside your usual bee-related schenanigans - but once you've restored a reef it's done, and you have access to not only the new bees/butterflies attracted to the bloomed flowers. Plus, Bumblemore gives you some pretty sweet items for each of the three reefs... [hr][/hr]

Setting The Scene

Bumblemore himself can be found out in the Tundra, I wanted a bit more of a fancier setpiece given his importance in the gameplay, and took the opportunity to update poor Skipper's piece of crap that hasn't been updated since the original alpha in 2020 - especially now there were a few more lore additions in this update that meant it'd make sense to match the two ships.
whats that weird little black box I wonder... Once I was happy with that the only thing left was to add all the new bees and butterflies, and damn it's actually been so long since I added a social bee I forgot how much was involved... Luckily past me had drawn a bunch of the coral bees already, so I only needed to draw two new ones, but loading in all the assets and all the correct dictionary entries took ages!
some new friends to discover out on the high seas! With all that loaded in I could test all the new mechanics fully. All that remains now is to actually spawn in the coral reefs automatically when the world loads (like how Sto + Codey pop into existence), and check I don't break things massively, but not too worried on that as it uses the same system as the 2.0 NPC areas, and we have way more open ocean to play with. With that done and the new set-piece in I can add Bumblemore and all the goodies he sells, including all the sweet diving equipment - but thats for next month! [hr][/hr] So not bad for a couple weeks work this month! We had a bit of crunch as well trying to get all the new writing and text ready to give to the localisation team early as they have quite a long lead time at the moment, but next month I should be able to finally make a stab on the last, and arguably most exciting part of the update (deep sea diving), and get a finished build over to QA! Also, welcome to all newbees who've started their adventure thanks to the Wholesome Games sale! If you've been enjoying this silly lil bee game pls give it a nice review on Steam - it helps us massively and keeps me motivated through some of the gnarlier parts of these content updates <3 ~ Ell [This post was released early for KoFi Supporters]