APICO News

Hey friends!

Another month flies by, it feels like I was only just writing the June recap! Here's whats been going on.

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The lovely people at Wholesome Games have organised a Steam Sale that’s host to all sorts of cosy games, with some sweet discounts on offer!

As part of the sale, APICO will be 40% off until 7th August, with both OSTs 50% off as well.

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For the redditors among you, you might have heard of a little thing called /r/place - a community canvas where everyone can get involved.

Thanks to the help of the community, we were able to get APICO immortalised in a small section with a bunch of other indies you might know!

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We were lucky enough to have APICO selected for the Itch.io Summer Selects Bundle, a special bundle containing APICO and 5 other cool indies!

Thanks to everyone who bought the bundle and supported us, we hope you enjoy all your new sweet games
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For our console friends, 2.2.3 is now live on Xbox / Playstation. This was a small update but contained some important fixes and means the consoles are now in-line with PC!

Unfortunately Nintendo wasn’t as kind with approval and still won’t let the patch through, however you’re not missing out on anything major!

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So that’s a wrap on July, bee safe and we’ll see you next month!

Love,
Ell & Jamie

Hey friends!

Was a bit busy with Rift Breach and Snacktorio this month, but managed to polish off the rest of the fishing related stuff!

This post will contain spoilers of 3.0 content.

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[h2]Gone Fishing[/h2]
So continuing where I left off I finished up the rest of the fishing minigame.

gotta be quick!

I'm still not sold on it 100%, but I just wanted something a bit more visually interesting than the usual "click and wait and click again" type fishing we're all used to.

I also properly fleshed out all of the fish and their spawning conditions, biome, time etc. Doing this made me realise there were some "missing" biomes that needed some fish too so I drew a couple of new fish to even things out at a nice round 15.

so many new friends to discover!

With that done I did some testing with the different lure types and then that was fishing done!

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[h2]Captain Cabinets[/h2]
With that done I needed the fishing NPC, Skipper's Dad, so that I could then introduce him, fishing concepts, plus some different fishing themed items and decor.

look at all these new goodies!

I wanted to add a few different things that people could add near their docks, as well as a new type of pier tile to mix things up a bit. Alongside the new fishing board + lure workshop I felt like it made for some cute seaside building!

bird? what bird?

After giving him his own spawn area / base, the only thing left is the writing for the Captain himself, but I'll be giving Jamie all the writing in one go as it helps make everything a bit more consistent with each other

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With the fishing done and the Captain added, it means I can get stuck into the coral reef and diving stuff next, which is the majority of the 3.0 content but I had to add a lot of "new" systems to get the fishing working which held me up a lot.

~ Ell

[This post was released early for KoFi Supporters]

Hey friends!

We're now halfway through the year, which is a scary thought given all the things I still want to get done in 2023... better get to it!

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So after a very long time, APICO has finally released on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

This is the latest version of the game, and includes all the beeautiful butterfly content! We hope all the new beekeepers enjoy their stay at Port APICO
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Rift Breach got a bunch of new updates, and the demo was re-released for Steam’s Nextfest, which you can still try out!

Unfortunately it didn’t really gather any response or interest, so it’ll be going into cold storage for a bit while we work on the other games.

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Mudborne got nominated for the “Rising Star” award in the 2023 UK Indie Cup!

We didn’t win in the end, but the fact that a little 1 week froggy demo managed to get a nomination is still amazing to see!

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Feed The Beasts is now Snacktorio! We had to change the name for legal reasons and we asked the Factorio team as a joke, but they said yes.

It’s weird having to call it something different after 3 years but here we are - you can find us in all the same places just a different name and logo.

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So that’s a wrap on June, bee safe and we’ll see you next month!

Love,
Ell & Jamie

Hey friends!

A slow but steady start made this month into the 3.0 content, with a bunch of little tweaks to get us started!

This post will contain spoilers of 3.0 content.

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[h2]Birthday Bee![/h2]
May was a special month as it's the birthday month for APICO having been released a year ago on World Bee Day (20th May)! We had a lot of different sales + deals to celebrate, leading to DOUBLE the amount of players we'd had up until that point in one week.

(To all the new bees - welcome! I hope you enjoy this silly lil bee game

Safe to say I was pretty busy running around putting out fires and answering a million questions all over the place - but I did manage to still get some development work done eventually!

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[h2]Where To Beegin[/h2]
One problem I have with gamedev in general is getting p. overwhelmed with how much there is todo - you've seen the list of stuff planned for 3.0 and when broken down into dev work it's even longer!

here's just some misc + fishing stuff broken down - not even the coral or ocean stuff yet!!

What I try to do is break it down into smaller sections, and then start with the "quick wins" to try and make a dent in the list first so as to not get too demoralised. When there's only one developer it's definitely a LOT (let alone the fact I have 2 other games on the go at the same time)

I started out working through some quick fixes and changes though, like adding the moon, moon phases, and a cute little pocketwatch to give more details on the top-left GUI icons you always see.



I also did some stuff like creating new natural beehives when you repopulate a species (to add to the feeling of actually impacting the world), updating some of the logic with butterflies + flowers, and adding in some new hairstyles - basically just lots of little things to help settle back into the codebase.

this one looks weirdly familiar...

With that I was starting to feel a bit more warmed up and more used to how APICO does things, so I added the first new machine for 3.0 - the fly workshop!

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[h2]Fly Fishing[/h2]
I've wanted to add fishing to the game for a while, as I think it's a nice "time-waster" to fill in the gaps between waiting for certain things in APICO, but didn't give much thought outside of the general concept.

When I sat down to look at it properly I thought fly fishing would be the best route, as needing to craft little lures seemed like the perfect vibe for APICO. Crafting lures would also let me give some of the special bee produce a use, as it would effect the overall lure "luck" and the player always has plenty of them.

about time we had a new mechanism huh?

The fly workshop takes hoops, twine, glue and feathers (dropped from birbs!), along with your special produce to make a little lure - the stats decided by the materials you use.

Once you have your lures you'd be able to use them along with a rod to cast into any deep water to start the fishing minigame! I spent a bunch of time deciding the best way to do this, and what I settled on was a two-parter, first cast the lure out, and then wait for fish to appear and get within "range" to grab 'em.

grab radius is based on how close you cast to the center yellow "goal"

It also took me far too long getting a nice "arc" for the lure when cast, and I wanted a nice back and forth animation to mimic the way fly fishers actually cast their lures.

i hate maths so much

With that I had the actual grab minigame todo, which will involve the little fishies coming near and attempting to eat your delicious honey flavour lure - unless you grab them in-time, which then catches you a fish!

Different conditions/biomes/weather will affect the fish caught (as you'd expect from APICO), and ultimately it'll just be an optional collect-them-all - although you will get some new special items for doing so...



I'm taking my time on the minigame as I want to get it right - and there's nothing quite like it in APICO so it's a challenge trying to make something fit correctly with what players are used to!

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Once I've finished off the fishing i'll be adding Skipper's Dad, and then fishing will be done for now and we can move onto Coral Reefs!

I've got to go back to Rift Breach for a bit next month for NextFest but have set aside some time for another chunk of 3.0 goodies.

~ Ell

[This post was released early for Supporters]

Hey friends!

May has flown by, and it's an important anniversary month for both APICO and myself personally, marking the start of me making games 3 years ago. Here's whats been going on:

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May 20th was APICO’s birthday! We had lots of deals and sales to celebrate - don’t worry if you missed out though as we have an Itch.io one still to come!

The hive doubled in size in just a week, so thank you to all the newbees that have joined us - we hope you enjoy
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Voting has now ended for the “Design A Butterfly” competition, and the winner was @Hollibee’s “Sunset Butterfly”

Everyone had such a difficult time deciding, thank you for all the artists for their wonderful entries!

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So it’s been confirmed APICO will be coming to Xbox soon, stay tuned next month for some date announcements!

Xbox initial release will include the 2.0 butterfly update by default
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The groundwork for 3.0, aka ”What Lies Beeneath” has started, with a hefty devlog you can read over on Ko-Fi or Steam!

No dates to announce yet but we’re still aiming for Q3/Q4 this year
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So that’s a wrap on May, bee safe and we’ll see you next month!

Love,
Ell & Jamie