Bee Cooperative

Bee Cooperative is a cooperative board game about a swarm of bees trying to save themselves from natural disasters caused by climate change. Together players vote on actions and help each other avoid extinction. If one part of the swarm fails, the whole swarm is bound to become extinct. If the swarm reaches the end of the game, every player can see if they can reach a balance between their own victory condition and the overall survival of the swarm.

The game was made for "Game and Mod Jam"

Genre: Cooperative voting board game

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Team Size: 4

Duration: Oct 2023 - May 2024

Platform: board game

(available on Tabletop Simulator)

Website: itch.io

Initial concept. Pillars.

The central theme of the game jam was “Climate change”.

Teaming up people around a common interest - bees - we felt that creating a game about bees and the climate crisis was a natural choice. The cooperative mechanics of a board game about a species heavily impacted by environmental changes perfectly translated into an allegory of the collective effort of humanity to avoid the point of ecological no-return.

The central message of the concept was that only collective and cooperative effort can help the bees succeed, and sometimes sacrificing personal profit over collective well-being is the only way to survive. Thus cooperation, altruism, and sacrifice were set as pillars of the game.

Post-jam contributions

After the game jam, I:

Designed and balanced game characters’ abilities and personal win/lose conditions, creating a dynamic coopetition between different characters.
Balanced and iterated on the challenge system - the events that would influence characters and the game state.
Balanced the values of events and the abilities’ strengths and costs to create the desired difficulty curve.

Fighting perfect cooperation

After the initial game jam presentation, addressing perfect cooperation became crucial. Players consistently agreed with each other, resulting in an overly optimal game state that lacked challenge.

To counter this, several features were introduced:

Resource value: Each character gained unique resource uses, ensuring every resource mattered and encouraging strategic resource allocation.
Diverse resource utility: Varied and impactful resource uses require the players to carefully distribute the resources between each other.
Communication challenge: Initially attempted with time limits, later refined to a word limit per player, it incentivized concise and strategic communication while offering resource spending as a communication extension.

Characters abilities

Soon after the game jam, we realized: despite varying losing conditions for characters, the methods to avoid them remained uniform. It led to gameplay lacking diversity as players could aid each other without consequence or distinction. To give players unique responsibilities and agency, character abilities were introduced. These abilities empowered players to proactively prevent, predict, resolve, or counter every in-game challenge they met, fostering individual accountability and engagement.

Characters' dynamics

Making characters’ abilities impactful requires an understanding of their influences within the cooperative environment. With the game's cooperative nature in mind, the characters' abilities were designed to interplay and complement each other.

To define potential character relationships, I created a diagram based on the resources each character needed most (based on the colour of the resources). This helped to understand and plan players teaming up and who might compete at different points in the game.

The diagram was key in crafting win-and-lose conditions that either conflicted or complemented between the characters.

Winning conditions were about mastering challenges through teamwork, negotiation, or managing resources. Characters in the same group had conflicting goals, while those from opposing groups had goals that aligned.
Losing conditions mostly came from a lack of teamwork, tied to the resources in their group on the diagram. So, characters in the same group naturally agreed on decisions to avoid losing, while characters in opposite groups had to find compromises.
The cost of character abilities was set so players had to spend resources from their group on the diagram. Coincidentally, it was the same colour that was tied to two of their personal winning conditions. This way players started making personal sacrifices for the common good.
Characters on the colors' intersections had it easier since they could pick which color to spend, while those on the sides had to stick to one. This made trading more valuable.

Balancing

During playtesting, we recognized how crucial scarcity is for fostering competition. If players can easily access everything they need without relying on others, the game loses its edge. Scarcity forces tough decisions, where players can't have it all, making each action a meaningful choice. Balancing was essential to maintain the challenge while ensuring the game remained achievable.

To understand the average expected state of the game in each stage, I used 3 criteria:

3 possible game speeds - whether players take extra turns or just rush to the end of the game
4 different levels of cooperation between the players that were made tangible by setting it as “percentage of rounds when players cooperated perfectly.
Player count, affecting the overall resource availability in the game.

Based on the results of the first balancing round, I could:

Better define the resource drain rate caused by events in each game stage in each scenario. This translated into a more controlled difficulty curve.
Evaluate points at which player groups with different cooperation levels would face various challenges.
Balance the ability costs to make sense and not exceed the danger that would be prevented with this ability.

Takeaways

Overall this project was a great way to learn what is important for a good cooperative experience:

Cooperation should be an engaging hurdle to conquer; perfect harmony leads to dull gameplay.
The scarcity of resources and diverse, impactful spending options present players with tough yet crucial decisions.
Distinct roles and abilities foster a sense of personal responsibility and investment in the game's outcome.
Competitive dynamics arise when certain resources are coveted by multiple players, especially if they're essential for valuable actions, turning cooperation into a strategic challenge.
Enforcing rules increases players' cognitive load. Simplifying the rules or providing dietetic ways to enforce them helps to make even convoluted systems easier to comprehend.