A Year Gone By at Honeyvale

Wow, it’s been a while! So how about an update, huh?

It’s been a pretty good year. It’s been fast paced, which is why a blog post hasn’t come any earlier, but that doesn’t mean things haven’t been happening.

Despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to finish Alchemy Punch before university started back up at the start of the year. And, as it is both our final year of university, we needed to get into a team for our capstone project. We already have quite a nice team here, so we ended up associating our project with Honeyvale!

We started working on Bees Won’t Exist, which as you can probably guess, was inspired tangentially by our team name and yes, has bees. It’s a fast-paced hack n’ slash game, and you are almost certainly going to be hearing about it over the next few weeks. We’re all really excited to show you more stuff about it but for now check out the facebook page! We also have an ‘About’ page set up for it here if you wanted to learn more.

But I want to keep this post as more of a general, “What’s happening with Honeyvale?” post. And one thing that’s very notable is that we have some new crew on board for the capstone project!

I (Dylan) have moved to now Designer, Writer and Character Modeller / Rigger / Skinner / UV mapper. Sometimes I program and have definitely never snuck sassy comments into the code, despite anything the others claim.

Supcher has moved to being an Art Lead and Animator. He also does a lot of textures and is responsible to some amazing art for our meeting white boards as seen here. Oh, and also he does freaky paper puppets which, if I’m being honest, I sort of want to make a trailer for now.

David Baker is here! He did a guest post during the 48 Hour Game Making Challenge last year. He’s our Producer and a programmer, and is also responsible for a lot of the marketing. Once he did 100 hours of work in a single week, without even replacing his ionic capacitor.

Rory Dungan is also back from that same 48 hour competition. He’s the Lead Programmer and Senior Exotic Tea Provider, which comes in handy if we ever end up doing some work at his house.

Harrison Short is the only main developer who hasn’t been related to Honeyvale before. He is the Sound Lead and a programmer, but his primary role is in providing a never-ending stream of friendly sass.

Dante Mccoy isn’t part of the University but a friend of ours who wanted to help out by providing some environment models. Or we blackmailed him. (Can we just double check that we didn’t blackmail him before I press publish on this post?)

So we are the Honeyvale that is working on Bees Won’t Exist. The Alchemy Punch team is still just Supcher and I, and that’s on haitus for another month or so.

If you haven’t seen on our other socials, Bees Won’t Exist got accepted into the GCAP student showcase 2016 which we’re all absolutely thrilled by! The QUT Student Showcase, the university we are graduating from, clashes with this time, so we’re splitting who’s going to what:

Harrison, Baker and I will all be there for the full QUT showcase on the 2nd of November at 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM. Bee there or bee square.

Harrison and I will be at GCAP for the 1st of November only

Supcher and Rory will be at GCAP for both the 1st and the 2nd.

TLDR we’ll be at both, say hi!

Anyways, I think that covers it. Go ahead and leave any comments below if you have questions about anything I may have neglected to cover. Since we’re releasing Bees Won’t Exist very soon, there’ll be a few blog posts coming up about that. Stay tuned!