A downloadable game for Windows

On a stormy evening a marauding troll absconds with a beehive while being pursued by hunters. While the hunter's plans go awry, the troll stumbles into their pitfall trap, dragging the unfortunate bee with him. Separated from the broken fragments of her hive and stranded during a storm, the bee must find temporary refuge in the caves below the Bugbear Antfort and escape to safety. 

Meet friends and foes, discover treasures and traps, and traverse the dangerous caverns in this adventure inspired by Nintendo 64-era classics. 

This game is for Windows, but adheres to the hardware limitations of the Nintendo 64. It cannot be played on an actual console via flashcart or emulator. 

Keyboard controls are supported but controller is strongly recommended. All standard controllers are supported. The controls can be accessed in the menu and on the pause screen by pressing start or escape during the game.

Thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Hambleton for supplying the voice of the bee.


Controls (Keyboard or [Xbox/Switch/PS controller]):

Run: WASD or left stick

Walk: hold shift or left trigger

Camera: mouse or right stick

Reset camera: R3

Interact: E or A/B/Cross

Hover: Space orY/X/Triangle or Y/X/Triangle or L1

Dodge: RMB or B/A/Circle

Attack: LMB or X/Y/Square or R1

Equip Weapons: 1, 2, 3, 4, or D-Pad directions

Pause: escape or Start/+/Options

Toggle Fullscreen/Windowed: P or F11 (Options Menu coming soon!)

Download

Download
Beeknighted_v.3.7_Windows.zip 126 MB

Development log

View all posts

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

(+2)

This is my favorite game of the 22 Demo Disk, and I can't wait for more! It has such a strong classic Zelda vibe, like Ocarina and Wind Waker. I love honeybees and this one is a real cutie, great job!

(+2)

Hello, I saw a streamer playing your game and I really thought it was some obscure Nintendo 64 game. Good job on nailing that

(+1)

I will for sure bee (haha) playing your game upon full release! I had a lot of fun dealing with all the platforming and Ant threats!

I played your demo through the Spectral Mall Demo Disc, thus the thumbnail!

(+2)

Love the 3.7 demo, but the timing on the mushroom "puzzle" after getting to the caves is rough. my only gripe to the point i got frustrated and quit

(+2)

GODOT ENGINE??? BASED DEVELOPER

(+1)

So
As I am (slowly, but surely) working my way through the Demo Disc, Beeknighted got my attention right away, as a child of the PS1 / N64 era of Adventure-Platformers.

Kudos on creating a bee character that I, who hate bees, could immediately kind of love even as a mostly silent personality-void protagonist. The idea of this much smaller adventure happening inside a full fantasy world is neat, and I adore the premise of some enemies being mushroom-zombified insects. That's very neat.

For the most part, the game is great! It controls smoothly and is very fun and interesting and the demo is HUGE, with a lot of awesome content - but there are a few things about it that could see some ironing out.


For one, I found it odd to have the Blast Pods given to you long before your sword, and there really being no tutorial letting you know you could pick up web cones containign ammo or berries - the latter of which you don't get to use in the demo. Introducing a game mechanic that sees no use is a bit frustrating for that. 

Another is that I feel like bosses and regular enemeis alike just take too many hits. The second boss in particular became a nightmare not necessarily because he was hard, but because even when you knew what to do it took ages to beat him or even get a shot at his second form - on top of the range of his attacks being hard to gauge (for me, at least). It was also sometimes unclear on where you had to go next - which I get is a part of the exploration, but if defeating the second boss opens the big gate that leads to the next area, perhaps a cutscen should tell you so. I spent ages scouring every other room for some item I needed or the like without even considering I was allowed to move on.

These minor gripes aside, I adore Beeknighted - it feels very nostalgic to play, and I can't wait to see more. 

(1 edit)

Thanks for providing your detailed feedback! I've received a ton of great feedback from the demo which I have been taking into consideration in updates and changes to the demo content. 

In the future, the layout of the opening caves area will be reworked/streamlined. The general trajectory will remain the same, as the point of getting the blast pods before the sword was to discourage up-front fighting early on and focus more on puzzles, but I hope the update will smooth over the bumps in the flow of the beginning. Gemfruits do have a use near the end of the demo in the optional path on the west 2F side of Antfort, but there will be additional uses for them in the revision.

The difficulty of the bosses is something that has been on my mind a lot in creating the game. While I would like to avoid comparisons to Dark Souls whenever possible, the point of having the bosses be initially very challenging is to push the player to not think about them as duels/sword bouts and instead as puzzles to solve. On the one hand, they can all be brute-forced in a more difficult way, or, once a puzzle solution is discovered, defeated very quickly and easily using the mechanic, providing the option for players looking for more of a challenge. That said, I did recently revise Antonio's behavior to reduce the number of attacks between charges and stickerball drops because as you mentioned, it was taking too long to get a shot at him. 

Thanks again for playing, and hope you enjoy the remaining demos! 

(+1)

This was really good, but I am really bad at it lol

First area of Demo (No Commentary)

(+1)

Hey! I played this in the Spectral Mall Demo Disc and included it in my roundup video. Starts around 4:32 (if you only want to see this game). Best of luck with the development!

(+1)

Outstanding game, great atmostphere, doesnt just take me back to old Zelda games but actually into its completely own "dimension".

Only bug encountered ("Haunted PS1 Demo Disk 2022" version): When you throw pots against walls items sometimes get stuck in the wall and become unattainable, your walls might need some "push" against items colliding with them, so they press them out like they do with the player character.

(2 edits)

Thanks so much for playing! Yeah that was a long-standing bug that was always in the to-do list and actually just got patched today! The problem was actually that the pots actually get thrown too fast for Godot's collision detection at the start of the throw. it took me forever to figure out. There's also a 20% chance to get nothing from them which made it seem like it happens more than it does.

(+1)

Oh cool, makes sense then, thats good to know. Thank you for the fix and reply. Have a great day.

(+1)

Really nice game and a huge N64/ Majora's Mask feel to it as well. Keep it up.

Here's my channel for other games I have played. https://www.youtube.com/c/Levont

(+1)

Cool game, unreleased n64 vibe ->

(+1)

this was effin awsome a great zelda style game with a cute queen bee twist

(+1)

Loved it! wish the flight was a tiny bit longer, and  had more ability to control the height/etc with it. Great game overall, can't wait for the full release!

(+1)

The game isn't loading, it's only showing the godot start thing, but the weird thing is that I can still hear the sound effects and all I hear is an out of breath woman with creepy music playing. I'm using windows btw.

(+1)

Hmmm that's...disconcerting. I don't think I have a out of breath woman sound in the game. Were you hearing piano music? I've uploaded a new version of the demo which is very much further along than the previous version, perhaps that might fix the problem?

I just ran it and there's an issue. The game seems to be playing under the godot game engine overlay? I tried clicking around and tapping random buttons on my keyboard and heard a rain sound, so I held down w and heard foot steps and some sort of rapid swinging sound. do you know why this would be?

(1 edit)

Yeah, that's weird. So the game is loading but the splash screen isn't going away. I'll look into it and see if I can find a solution by the next patch. I've just put out a small update (version 1.9.1) with some other fixes, among them you can toggle fullscreen/windowed anytime by pressing 'P' or F11, which might fix it. 

(+1)

game says 1.4 in the text in main menu still

Yeah, I forgot to change the text on the title screen but it is the 1.5 version. But I've got a much more fleshed out demo for v.1.6 so the number jump will feel real. Just need to work through a few bugs and then I'll release it.

(+1)

Thanks for your reply, because of this I went ahead and made a video on this game giving my thoughts. Love this so far, looking forward to future.

(+1)

For a Demo it's alright. I don't know why the Bee has a sword if you don't really need it, but for a short game i recommend it. I made a video on this game if anyone is interested. The game starts at 0:00. 

Thanks for playing the jam prototype! Love the video! I'm working on a full demo which better shows off what the game will be (with combat, a dungeon, bosses, etc) which will be done sometime in April. And yeah I uh...definitely prioritized updating the Sonic OC-tier character model haha. 

(+1)

is this actually for n64 or just inspired by it?

(+1)

Inspired by the style, but only for PC. I've stuck to the limitations of the platform as best I could, though sadly the N64 is notoriously a nightmare to make games for and the engine I used can't be used to make homebrew games to my knowledge. Hypothetically all of the models, levels, and everything should work fine on an N64 but the code would have to be entirely rewritten which is beyond my abilities. 

(+1)

have you seen UltraEd?

It's a wip N64 engine on github

I haven't, I'll have to check that out! It sounds like a cool project.

Show post...

cool prototype

(+1)

Can't see the game when I start it. It just black screens outside of the UI elements. Do you mind fixing this?

That's unfortunate, can you tell me what platform you're playing on? At the moment I only have a Windows build but I'll have MacOS and Linux builds up after the voting period

(1 edit)

I'm on Windows and it was still doing it.

Hmm...could you tell me any more about the situation? So none of the 3D elements are loading but menus and the health bar and collectible counter appear? Are you playing windowed or fullscreen? Within the Itchio app or downloaded direct? What controller are you using if any? And just to confirm, you're on Windows 10?

Thank you for bearing with my on the issue, it's my first time compiling a game but if I can figure out the root cause of the issue and fix it I'll try to have a patch out as soon as voting ends.

Yeah! And I don't think the Pause menu is even showing up if there is one, and this error constantly pops up in the Console:

ERROR: instance_set_transform: Condition "Math::is_nan(v.x)" is true.

   At: servers/visual/visual_server_scene.cpp:723


I'm playing in windowed mode with the downloaded thing from Itch.io, I have several other controllers plugged in,  And I'm on Windows 10. If you need to know all of that.

Thank you so much for supplying all of that information! That helps narrow it down a lot if it's happening on the title screen. 

Based on cursory research, it's possible it's an issue with the Godot engine camera, as there seem to be some issues with camera positions returning non-number coordinates but I'm more inclined to believe I've done something wrong so I'll keep looking into it.  

Unfortunately I didn't get a pause working in time for the game jam, and it will be added to the next update.