Bee Kind

About the game

You are a beekeeper rabbit, and the bees are in trouble. They fly out to the flowers, carry pollen back to their hives and slowly make honey, but a gang of blue ZomBees wants that pollen for itself and does not mind smashing a hive on the way. Bee Kind is a small pixel-art platformer where every level is a garden to look after.

The trouble starts with the grubs. A grub that eats enough toadstools turns into a ZomBee, so part of your job is gardening: clear the toadstools and flowers have room to grow. A pickup lets you fire honey that calms the enemies down, and a little JS13K badge makes you untouchable for a moment. When a hive has made enough honey, new baby bees are born, and that is how you win: defeat the enemies and grow the colony to the number the level asks for. Some levels also switch between the side view and a top-down maze, so keep an eye on the walls.

picosonic made Bee Kind for js13kGames 2022, whose theme was "Death": if the bees die out, we all do. The whole game, music included, fits in 13 KB when packed for the contest.

Playing it here

Click Play, then press Enter, Space or Shift to get past the intro. The game has a short training level that explains the honey gun and the grubs. Nothing is saved between visits.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Grab the honey gun early. The first level teaches it, and from then on it is the safest way to deal with a ZomBee.

Clear the toadstools. A grub with nothing to eat stays a grub.

Look after the hives. Enemies attack them, and each hive is what makes new bees.

Credits and licence

Bee Kind was created by Jasper Renow-Clarke (picosonic). Some art comes from Kenney's "Pixel Line Platformer" (CC0), and the music is an excerpt of Johann Strauss II's "Blue Danube", in the public domain. The game is released under the MIT licence; the licence texts are linked from this page. The Web Monetization hook from the original was removed.