Game Design Document for Beekeeper Simulator 

Current as of 10.03.23 

Game pitch

You are a hobbyist beekeeper that dropped out of school to pursue your bee dreams, taking care of your bees in your backyard and cultivating a garden with their help. Raise and maintain bees, make sure they’re happy, and grow your garden with many beautiful flowers and decorations in this chill, laid-back game.

Game Aesthetics  

Buzzwords: calm, relaxing, cute, cosy, satisfying and bees.

Genre

Relaxing simulation.

Target Audience

Casual players, players who enjoy bees, decorating, gardening and easy relaxing cute aesthetic games.

Platforms

Windows, Mac & WebGL (itch.io)

Software

Unity 2021.3.16f, Maya, Blender, Photoshop and ProCreate.

Gameplay Aesthetic

Player should feel cosy, relaxed, calm and happy while playing the game. At the end of the game, the player should feel excited and cathartic as they successfully care for their bees and create a pretty garden. 

Game is similar to slime rancher by taking care of the slimes and the ranch. It feels cozy and relaxing, longer day/night cycle like Minecraft to not feel so stressed while completing tasks and with no strict timed tasks the gameplay loop is very relaxed.

Team Description

Olivia Cahyono

Olivia's strengths are Illustration (Rendered and concept art), Animation 2D & Simple 3D modeling. Olivia's main areas of responsibility for the game are concept art and UI art. Her secondary area is 3D Modelling.

Zoey Lu

Zoey's strengths are 3D Animation and 3D Modeling. Zoey's main area of responsibility for the game is 3D Modelling (flowers, plants, and non-organic assets).

Tara Brown

Tara's strengths are General Unity knowledge & Itch.io project management (dev logs, game documents, game page), Shaders, lighting, vfx, 3D modeling, texturing, UV unwrapping, UI & unity programming. Tara's main areas of responsibility for the game are shaders and visual effects and lighting. Tara's secondary areas are programming, 3D Modelling, texturing, and UI.

Tenzin Tsephel

Tenzin's strengths are 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, some shading, shaders & Concept art. Tenzin's main area of responsibility for the game is 3D modeling (flowers, trees and non-organic assets).  Tenzin's secondary areas are lighting, shaders, and concept art.

Akiki Liang

Akiki's Stengths are programming, script mechanics integration and ensuring GDD is detailed and updated + making sure it gets transferred into the game. Akiki's main areas of responsibility for the game are the player controls, camera,  pickup/drop, and inventory system.

Ali Gencoglu

Ali's strengths are programming, general unity knowledge, shaders, 3D modeling, UI, and unity animations. Ali's main areas of responsibility for the game are the UI scripts, flower management scripts, the bee's programming, optimization, and interactivity (both mechanics and for art bees to use scripts). 

Sacha Goldman

Sacha's strengths are programming, managing the git repository, and optimization. Sacha's main area of responsibility for the game is the beehive interactions.

Grey Le

Grey's strengths are sound design, music production, and sound effects. Grey's main area of responsibility for the game is the menu music. Grey's secondary area is sound effects.

Salome Zhang

Salome's strengths are sound design, music mixing and production and sound effects. Salome's main area of responsibility for the game is the day/night game music. Salome's secondary area is sound effects.

Gameplay & Mechanics

Intended gameplay

The game starts off by explaining the controls and gameplay loop to the player before allowing them to enter the garden. This explanation will be through environmental objects with UI attached rather than a tutorial so the induction into gameplay is faster and more progressive. 

The player will enter a new game inside the house, after unlocking the door the player will then be able to do the following: buy flowers, jars, and decorations, pick up items (jar, watering can, flowers, beehive), place items, interact with the bees and environment (beehives, flowers, shipping bin), sell the honey, sleep in the bed and fulfill orders. 

The end of the game is when the player feels satisfied with their garden, bee care, and orders.

Player Goals

Care for bees by decorating the garden, producing honey, and selling honey.

Deorate garden - Mechanics:

Open the shop through the tab to purchase hives, jars, flowers, and decorations. Place down purchased items within the garden game area boundaries. 

Produce honey - Mechanics:

Plant flowers near beehives for the bees to pollinate. Wait until the hives have enough honey. Collect honey from the beehives with the jars.  Plant specific flowers in more volume around a hive to gain more specific honey faster.

Selling honey - Mechanics:

Place the jars in the shipping bin and receive a money alert which gets added to the player's inventory. Each different honey type has a higher or lower monetary value. Sleep to skip the night cycle so the bees return to pollinating and producing more honey.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse as the heavy use of UI interaction from the player would not translate well to controller use. WASD & Space for player movement, E for interacting while holding items, the tab for shop UI, right/left click for place and pick up. Inventory selection is number input (1-3) and/or mouse scrolling. These controls are inspired by Minecraft, Slime Rancher, and fps games.  

Controls are inspired by Minecraft inventory system (numbers correspond with inventory slot) and Stardew Valley item placement but more freeform sort of like animal crossing.

Gameplay Loop

Elements of Fun

Main Elements

Placing hives and flowers, to see your beekeeping business expand & making more and more money by producing and selling more and more honey.

Secondary Elements

Getting to choose which flowers to plant, getting to choose the way your yard is arranged and just enjoying watching bees fly around and looking at your yard.

Game Flow 

New game -> spawn inside house (maybe list of tasks to tutorial) -> go outside -> start with one hive, bee and flower -> player sees bar filling up on jar -> pick up jar once full, take honey and puts into jar 

Shop catalogue to buy more flowers, decorations, jars, and beehives. The player makes money by selling honey in the shipping bin and money goes into inventory. Player can speed up delivery by sleeping in bed to alter the day/night cycle. Beehives are bought with money and bees are attracted from the wild over time (just happens). 

Bees are able to be petted. The hidden mechanic is the "B" cam which is a bee-perspective camera view. The house has a bed, gameplay book and the watering can and jar's first placement spot. Players will be able to place items which helps with full inventory issues when too many items are bought the day before.

Everything has a value so whatever you put in the shipping bin will automatically extract the value of the object and add it to the amount to be given on the next day.

There will be a section with some kind of ordering system for filling orders so the honey has a further purpose. Watering system for flowers and weather/season modifications.

Beat Charts

Gameplay Area

House and garden:

Level design:

Character & asset design 

Colour Palette

The main theme of our colours are pastel and vibrant colours, like genshin impact and slime rancher.

Player character 

The item held is shown in the corner. First-person camera perspective. No player mesh.

Non-player characters

Bees

Other Assets

Day/night cycle UI, Skyboxes, lighting, flowers (Daisies, Roses, Hydrangeas, Peonies, Sunflowers, Daffodils, Tulips and Lavender), honey jar, beehives, shipping bin, bed, house, table, watering can, river, trees, plants (mushrooms, cattails) and decoration items (tea set, outdoor table and chair).

Shaders, Lighting, Skyboxes & Effects

Geometry Grass Shader

The grass is inspired by Breath of the Wild [BOTW] & Genshin Impact which has a gradient, affected by light and wind, and is a tool/method for specifically painting grass position.

Honey Jar Fill Shader

The honey shader affects only the inside of the jar and can be adjusted via scripts. It jiggles like honey when the player is holding the jar and has cell shading to match game assets.

Cell Shader

Shader receives textures and specular lighting from skybox and lights, inspired by BOTW & Genshin Impact, and has a simple setup for our art bees to use on assets.

Water Shader

The water shader is to be updated from the previous project to look like a rushing river, as well as added foam inspired by this shader  [SHADER LINK] and refraction for underwater assets.

Wind Effect

This shader affects the flowers and trees to match up with the grass shader’s wind effects.

Watering effects (Water Can/Flowers)

Water Can

The water coming out of the can will be a particle system that is gravity affected and follows the direction of the camera.

Flower

The water drops on the flower will have a particle effect with water droplets or a shine effect to signify that the flower is watered which is for player feedback when watering, this gradually wears off and if the flowers are not watered their material is gradually dulled and turned to greyscale during the day/night cycle.

Post Processing Effects

Bloom 

This will achieve the anime glowing effect but balance it so it has an effect but isn’t too overwhelming.

Lens flare

This soft flare for water droplets on flowers and the river will bring them to life.

Dynamic Exposure

It helps with that clear bright day lighting to adapt a little more real to our day/night cycle.

Tone mapping

It will universally give the game the same colour palette across all devices and screens so that our intended textures and lighting are the same for all players.

Lighting

Global Lighting

Ambient Occlusion -  Consistency across assets.

Subsurface scattering - Makes the windows, flower, and tree leaves shadows more realistic.

PBR - for consistency between lighting and assets.

Radiosity - it helps with assets receiving colour information from the lighting so when it's warm, everything actually looks warm

Reflection mapping - brings more life to the windows, water, and river.

Inside House

Point lights from a source (light fixture or lamp). Ambient lighting from outside through the windows, harsh shadows. Warm lights, in the range of “candlelight” to “incandescent light”.

Game Area 

Bright, no fog, water droplets reflect, river reflection! Maybe have reflection probes set up? (look into if it's worthwhile or not). Soft shadows and maybe gradually go harsher during the day/night cycle . Bright/warm during the day for that cosiness, oranges, golds, compliment the honey colour. Skybox visually changes from sunrise to day (maybe alternating between clear sky and scattered clouds (shadows from that would be neat)). Dark/warm during the night, emulating a warm summer night kinda atmosphere, moonlight directional light?. Skybox visually changes to a sunset and then night

Outside game boundary

Lighting and textures fade to duller colours on the game edges just as a depth illusion so we don’t have to model and texture as much if the player can only see it at a certain angle.

Skyboxes

The atmosphere is anime-inspired, stylistic, and cell-shaded. The day skybox will have clouds and a clear sky and the night skybox with stars.

Music & Sound Design

Music and Sound Inspirations

Slime rancher, Stardew Valley - Different in - game music depending on time of day, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Moonlighter.

Links for music inspiration:

Mood

Our goal is to create a bright, uplifting, gentle, relaxing and calm sounds that set the tone and pace of our game.

Background music

Main menu & In game music

Rough draft:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16P-0xtnQv3UemW5E8U9XPQALbSgy7_jQ?usp=sha...

Sound Effects

Nature sounds

Water stream, Bee buzz, Tree rustle and Birds tweeting

Footsteps

Stepping on grass sound & Stepping on wood floor sound

Action triggered sound effects

Menu pop up sound + turning paper sound, Drawing check mark with pencil sound, Closing heavy wooden bin and Watering flowers sound

Sound samples:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PQMlEIUdvonchd6dzmy3uwGFIkqjbbB0?usp=sha...

Playtesting

Priority List

1. Bug fixing - flowers dont place correctly so bees do not pollinate, when jar is full of honey and place honey disappears

2. UI to help with controls and gameplay loop

Project Timeline

Management

We will be using Jira for project management to distribute tasks, progress updates for the entire team to see and finalising tasks.

Timeline

Next playtesting March 14th - fixed bugs from the previous playtesting finished full shop loop, fixed any art inconsistencies and finish watering system.