Made some huge leaps over the past couple of days in terms of logic for the showdown system. I managed to finally get a WIP version that didn't crash and is generally in the ballpark of what I want it to look like, now it's about getting all the pieces in-between functioning and working as expected. I'd say it's like throwing a rope across a ravine to build a bridge. Once I've got all the animations, visual queues and tempo of the showdown system done, that means I can finally certify that The Lucky Hive has a workable demo before multiplayer starts. What an exciting time!

Happy New Year!

Just an update for the end of the year and beginning of the new one. I've been working on getting the showdown element of The Lucky Hive implemented, including massively overhauling the codebase and general systems as my skills with Godot and GDScript have improved. The showdown system is the final element of the core gameplay loop, marking the end of a game. I'm trying to make it fun in a way that gives it a Japanese game show vibe, but also still preserve the amount of information that's normally given to players in poker. Currently the showdown system is on its 3rd iteration, as I had this dolly camera system that would snap to each player and prompt their hand, but it felt really lazy and often would cause information issues since I'd have to hit TAB constantly to compare to other players' hands before deciding. I've attached a screenshot of the WIP showdown system.

Code Overhaul

Currently there is a monstrous file called "Globals.gd" where I have thrown literally everything that couldn't be contained within a scene into this file. Things like turn management, pot data, starting new games, prompting players for new turns and everything. It's getting way too complicated to add something new on since the file is so multipurpose, let alone debug an issue where all scripts are making routine calls to one singleton for information. The plan is to break up Globals into 3 systems, one being called Turnmaster which obviously handles turn data and Potmaster which handles the pot data and player data (about seat locations, is an NPC/AI player, sidepot information, minimum bets etc.). Globals still has a bunch of useful stuff about player information like if they're the executable seat (the person playing the game) and whatnot, but data about if the player is all in or what their total contribution to current round is is all being moved into Potmaster and all turn management data is going into Turnmaster.

Since it's been years since I've done any real software programming outside of web development, so I've had to really appreciate design patterns again and make use of things like factories, prototypes, singletons and whatnot. Unfortunately GDScript is limited in its syntax and capabilities in some areas, such as abstract classes or interfaces, but that's totally fine. Thankfully you can still extend classes and create base classes for things like multiple characters and whatnot. Documenting my code has been tremendously helpful as well in this regard, since often I've come back to ways of doing things and totally overhauled it (such as not realising you can define classes in GDScript for scenes).

Nearing Completion & Multiplayer

Once the showdown system is tested and functioning, I'm going to commence work on the multiplayer aspect of the game. I've done a lot of reading regarding implementation in Godot and it seems like there's a way of synchronising properties as a consumer and then distributing new values/states as an owner (since we're doing P2P multiplayer). Properties that need to be synced would include head movement, states (looking at cards), raise amounts, turn order and stuff like that. It's going to be interesting to see what I can keep on the client side and what needs to be distributed.

Some Other Things

I definitely need to look at the lighting in the game. There was that huge optimisation issue with omnilights causing 40-60M primitives and like 3,000+ draw calls, totally nuking performance, but now the game's lighting looks really poor, especially in detailed areas like looking at cards, flicking chips etc. I think I need to define all cards, chips and low poly things to cast shadows from a light source and hide shadows on the characters (and especially the dealer). Also since playing Balatro this week for the first time I've realised just how many sound queues there needs to be in The Lucky Hive, so I'm working on little animations and jiggles for events and state changes.

Anyway, just a lengthy update, I'm hoping to get the game out sometime this month or at the absolute worst late next month, just depending on my work schedule and complications from things like multiplayer or general bugs/improvement.

Been working hard to get this game into a state where it's fun, stable and in a functioning state (at least code-wise) for the commencement of introducing multiplayer into The Lucky Hive. The new user interface is looking considerably better than the old debug interface, there's a new tab menu to see which player's turn it is, how much money they have and eventually what their latency is. There's also a new "pot menu" so that you can see how much each pot is valued at (up to 5 pots total including the main pot) and the icons of the players who are in each pot.

From here it's about continuing to improve the game's stability, especially when it comes to non-players or what I call "non-executable players", essentially the player that is controlled by the person running the game. I have no idea at this moment as to how this is going to work for multiplayer, but hopefully it's just a matter of syncing up states and the server owner sort of just owns the data. The game is going to be P2P so there's a lot of flows in terms of lobby hosting, syncing states with the owner, negotiating seats at the table (randomly allocating) and also integrating with the Steam SDK for Steam Relay and things I have no idea where to even begin.

One other thing is there was this huge issue with draw calls and an insanely high primitive count on non-Windows devices (like I'm talking 60,000,000 triangles being drawn) and it has taught me valuable lessons with respect to how Godot's lighting works. Having 15 omni-lights all in close proximity drawing shadows on high polycount geometry with no baking will absolutely WRECK performance. I simply turned off shadows for all omni-lights in the game (and removed the downward facing directional light) and the game's total draw calls have now dropped to ~350 and the primitive count is hovering around 800-1.2M (which my Steam Deck handles no problem). Also turning on LODs for static geometry, like the Lucky Hive sign at the entrance to the room, since the geometry was never retopologised or optimised (just decimated in Blender).

Anyway, things are going well with the game, keen to get some more developments over the Christmas period and get started on Multiplayer so we can playtest whilst I'm home for Christmas.

I've created 6 new characters for The Lucky Hive. I'm super happy with how they look and I think they really brighten the game up in terms of visuals but also the personality that they display. I think it's super important that players can select a character they want to look like in the game.

Their names are a WIP but hopefully they're illustrative of what they might look like:

1. Workerman

2. Scoutman

3. Soldierman

4. Remembriar

5. Engineerman

6. Psychicman

This is on top of the Slugman that already exists in the game. Got some new things to learn when getting these guys into the game, especially when it comes to sharing animations and ensuring that things like bone attachments (for left and right hand) sync up properly. I also need to learn a ton about how to program up the script to set the character based on the exported var type (so that you can just set the variable and the code will swap out the meshes, rigs but preserve the animations).

On a quick note, you may notice that the bodies are the exact same and only the head changes. I thought I would learn how to do multi-body bones, rigging or whatever is involved in a future game; my skillset is currently not there to have the positions on the table (like resting on the table) using IK solvers or whatever. Godot is planning on updating this in the near future as well, so there's no point in using a knowingly deprecated system that could be replaced on me tomorrow. I also stupidly deleted the high resolution base mesh for the Slugman, so I can't really go back and re-draw things like the veins or general skeleton.

Once the game is out on Steam, I'll make a post with all the concept art I made for the game and "WIP" stuff that was part of my first game. Anyway, here's a photo of all them, just blankly staring at the camera (in the order that I provided in the list above). Anyway, I'm writing this at 2am on a Monday morning, so I should probably get some sleep.

More coming soon!

Made some great progress this weekend. Added in some more visual effects, cleaned up the end of game showdown logic and also massively improved the way that players actually just interact with the room, their cards and giving their decisions some weight. There are still a lot of improvements that need to be made, such as making a "versus"-style system so you can compare hands to see who won (like a real showdown), since it's quite boring for players to slap their cards down and the winner is just announced.

Before starting that however, I'm moving onto working on some rudimentary player AI so that there can be some decisions made autonomously, rather than me just making the selection myself. Once this is done, it ties in nicely with the beginning of working on multiplayer so a demo can then be released on Steam and feedback can start to be gathered. Hoping all things go well from here, since I'm aiming for an early January 2026 release (at the earliest).

I wasn't super happy with how the players just casually dumped their cards on the table, then the camera panned around, showing them and eventually just announced who won. I wanted to have a system that cut to that player, let them have the decision to fold or reveal their hand and if they were the last person to go, then announce who had the winning hand. This way you sort of didn't "forget" who's hand was what and it was really clear who had the winning hand (or in chopped pots, who won the pot(s) <- (sidepots included)).

Making a bunch more updates, especially when it comes to visuals. Once the site can support images and other media, I'll probably upload a bunch of "pre-demo" screenshots before we release the actual demo on Steam.

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out why, on my laptop and even my PC, the framerate has been so bad for the game. I wanted the game to have little cameras attached to the player's viewport, so that you sorta had a head mount camera you could always see in your viewport. I thought it would look cool and give vibes of a Japanese game show (if you know what I'm talking about). This has given me nothing but problems in terms of performance.

I disabled all layers, disabled shadows, simply had just the player and the room in the background, which did improve performance but, in the process, totally ruined the visuals. Either it looks like an attached game show camera or nothing at all.

Ultimately I've decided to can the cameras and instead replace them with the player's Steam profile picture, since it was causing framerates to drop from 240-250 on my laptop down to 30fps consistently. It's either this: have a substandard looking camera that looks extremely low quality (even being rendered at a true 64x96 resolution, it still has to draw shadows and the background) or have high framerates. I think I know which one I'd prefer...

Maybe I'll revisit putting this back in the game at a later date when I've gotten better at Godot and just game development in general, but this feature is being sacrificed so anything with less than a 5070 can get 60fps+

Hello

This is the first blog post announcing our existence. We want to make games that are fun, combine multiple experiences together and make awesome worlds to explore and interact with.

We are working on our first game, The Lucky Hive (which you can wishlist right now on Steam). It's a game about playing poker with your friends inside The Hive, experiencing strange mechanics that increase the variety of gameplay, increases the fun and party-like experience of playing cards with your friends.

Our Goal

We want to make games that are highly enjoyable, with deep learning curves, mechanics and aesthetics that are unique. I think a lot of our games are going to be quite unique and not defined within one genre. Our first game is going to be a multiplayer card game, but we want to make bigger and bigger games as we get better, more refined in our visual design and more experienced in what makes a great video game.

We are making games for ourselves really, so if you get a lot of enjoyment out of our games then this has all been worth it.

Inspirations

Who knows where things will go, but I'd like to thank these games and people in advance as a huge source of inspiration to want to make games:

Games

1. Kenshi

2. RimWorld

3. Stardew Valley

4. Factorio

5. Deus Ex

6. Runescape

7. Starbase

8. SOMA

9. Signalis

10. Minecraft

11. Jump King

12. Dark Souls

13. Limbo of the Lost

There's so many games that we've played collectively, but I think these 13 games have been the most important in terms of shaping our appreciation for game design, creativity, sound design, music and the fact that small teams can make incredible games.

People / Creators

1. Notch (Minecraft, Levers & Chests)

2. Chris Hunt (Kenshi)

3. Eric Barone (Stardew Valley, Haunted Chocolatier)

4. Tynan Sylvester (RimWorld)

5. Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)

6. Joel Zimmerman (deadmau5)

7. Klaus Schulze

8. Mick Gordon

9. Terry A. Davis

Personally I would attribute these 9 people to be the most important in terms of proving that you can create things amazingly as a single man and have the power to create lasting changes with simply believing in what you're doing and seeing it through to the end.

Alright, that's enough waffle. We'll make more posts about the game as its nearing ready for a demo release on Steam. The site will also be updated over time to support things like files, comments/suggestions/feedback and also just other stuff (like visual display pages, concept art pages and whatnot).