Bee Jam

A Free-To-Play Bee Colony Sim

Play on IOS: Download on the App Store

Play on Android: Download on the Google Play store

Original title art

Assigning bees to a nursery

Foraging the open world

Managing a busy hive

Yellow jacket invasion!

About

Bee Jam is an educational mobile sim, inspired by games such as Hay Day and Fallout Shelter. The player takes control of a honeybee colony, assigning bees to different roles such as nursing, foraging, guarding the hive, or making honey. As the seasons change, the player will need to balance different aspects of the hive’s management to ensure that the population grows and stays healthy in the face of dangers such as heatwaves, pesticides, hive mites, and invasive wasps.

Created with help from actual beekeepers, Bee Jam’s mechanics and economy are designed from the ground-up to be based in real-world apiary science, and even includes an in-game encylo-bee-dia explaining all the different concepts and real-world bee facts introduced in the game.

My Contributions

• Worked closely with Honey Bee Labs and Frag Games to discover a feature set and aesthetic that achieved all client’s goals and felt “just right”

• Designed economy and gameplay mechanics

• Wrote and illustrated documentation for game and features

• Lead weekly meetings with client and development team to act as an advocate for both and move the project, balancing technical, budgetary, and schedule considerations

• Held regular meetings with engineering team to design game architecture and work out efficient technical solutions for edge case game states

• Participated in project’s business development, discussing opportunities with mobile game publishers for marketing and release support

My Process

In early conversations with HoneyBee Labs, we discussed creating an education game in the vein of SimAnt (Maxis, 1991), but re-imagined to be about honeybees and designed for play on a mobile device. The result of that conversation lead to this pitch deck.

Once we started discussing the project with development partner Frag Games, the vision for the project transformed into a more modern, free-to-play sim game, inspired by the likes of Fallout Shelter or Hay Day.

Early Bee Jam paper prototype

Early flow of game's economy

Page from 1st draft design doc

Early stage core loop sim

In-depth Bee Jam economy sim

In-depth Bee Jam economy sim

Working closely with Honeybee Labs to ensure gameplay reflected the actual science of how bees and bee keeping worked, I started by creating a paper prototype to validate the game's core loop, ensuring that the player's choices felt meaningful and created engagement. I spent the following months creating game design documentation, iterating on the project with Honeybee Labs and Frag Games to get the gameplay and the aesthetics just right. Toward the end of the project I created several simulations of the game's economy so that we could experiment with the balance of the game's variables.