When we introduced Hive Legacies, we talked a lot about where we want the game to eventually go.
Persistent characters.
A physical world.
Knowledge.
Experimentation.
Travel.
Resource scarcity.
NPCs.
Property.
Construction.
Crime.
Businesses.
Families.
Generations.
And a world that can remember what players have actually done inside it.
For our first development log, however, we wanted to do something different.
Rather than talk about where we hope to go, let's look at where we actually started and how much the game has already changed.
Because Hive Legacies did not begin with the interface you have seen in our recent screenshots.
It began with this.
It wasn't pretty.
There was no world map.
No detailed character portrait.
No physical representation of where you were standing.
No roads.
No buildings.
No individual meter-by-meter world tiles.
Mostly, there were menus.
But underneath those menus, some of the most important foundations of Hive Legacies were already beginning to work.
Players could authenticate through Hive.
Characters had persistent stats.
Possessions existed.
Players could gather resources.
They could eat.
They could rest.
Their actions and possessions were being stored in the database rather than disappearing when the page refreshed.
And even at this early stage, two systems that would become extremely important were already taking shape:
Knowledge and Experimentation.
The game did not look like much yet.
But the simulation had begun.
The next major step was giving those systems somewhere to exist.
This was one of our first attempts at a world map and travel system.
Instead of simply selecting actions from menus, characters could begin moving between actual locations.
Travel had time associated with it.
Other people in the same area could be displayed.
And we began our first attempt at allowing players to customize how their character was represented.
This changed something fundamental.
The character was no longer simply a collection of statistics in the database.
They were becoming a person located somewhere in the world.
Location would eventually become one of the most important pieces of the entire simulation.
Where are you?
What resources exist there?
Who else is there?
What do you own there?
How long does it take to reach somewhere else?
What happens while traveling?
Those questions started here.
Our original character customization approach evolved fairly quickly.
Instead of trying to build a traditional character creator where players individually select dozens of facial features, we moved toward a collection of preset painted portraits representing people who actually look like they belong in the world.
At the same time, travel became more visible.
Characters were no longer instantly teleporting between locations.
If somewhere takes time to reach, the character actually has to travel there.
That may sound like a small decision, but it has enormous consequences later.
Distance creates geography.
Geography creates regional resources.
Regional resources create trade.
Trade creates routes.
Routes create opportunities for merchants.
And dangerous routes create opportunities for somebody else entirely.
Experimentation was also becoming much more concrete.
Hive Legacies does not revolve entirely around the traditional MMORPG system of:
Gain level → unlock recipe → craft item.
Instead, characters can take materials they physically have access to and attempt different processes with them.
Strike or knap something.
Twist or weave it.
Cut or shape it.
Heat or harden it.
Bind or assemble it.
Mix or blend it.
The character may succeed.
They may fail.
They may learn something from the failure.
And eventually they may understand how to produce something they did not understand before.
The quality of the materials matters.
The character's knowledge matters.
Their relevant abilities matter.
Focus and fatigue matter.
What they are actually attempting matters.
The goal is for crafting knowledge to feel like something characters learn, not simply something an account unlocks because a number became large enough.
This was one of the biggest jumps.
The interface received a significant redesign, but the much more important change was underneath it.
We began separating the world into different spatial layers.
There was now a larger World Map, along with a Local Map made from individual hexes.
Resources could exist in particular places.
Characters could exist in particular places.
And we began implementing one of the defining ideas behind Hive Legacies:
If a resource exists somewhere, players are interacting with the same resource.
You are not entering your own private copy of the world.
If players gather from a location and deplete what is there, another player who arrives afterward sees that same depleted location.
The world has changed.
That immediately turns gathering into something more interesting than clicking a resource button.
A particularly productive area might attract people.
Those people might build nearby.
Businesses might begin relying on it.
Then the resource could become scarce.
Or exhausted.
Now materials need to come from somewhere else.
Prices can change.
Trade can change.
People can move.
A very large chain of events can eventually begin because something extremely simple happened:
Players used up what was there.
The world map continued evolving.
Roads began connecting locations.
Different terrain and routes could have different travel times.
Travel stopped being simply:
Location A → wait → Location B.
Characters actually occupy the road while traveling.
That means two players traveling in opposite directions can potentially encounter one another.
NPCs can travel those same roads.
You may pass someone.
Interact with them.
Recognize them.
Learn something.
Ignore them.
Or eventually have much less friendly reasons for noticing each other.
This stage also introduced The Voice, which appears in the lower-left portion of the interface.
The Voice is our developing tutorial and guidance system.
Rather than covering the screen in traditional tutorial popups, the idea is to have something that can help introduce the player to the world and its systems as they actually encounter them.
The Local Map was then refined into connected hexes representing the physical areas surrounding the character.
This was another important transition in how we were thinking about the world.
A hex wasn't going to simply mean:
You are in the forest.
It needed to represent an actual parcel containing physical features and resources.
The current interface describes Hex Detail as a 25m parcel, with the deeper view divided into 1-meter square tiles.
That distinction prepared the game for the next major step.
This is where persistence became much more tangible.
Once you enter Hex Detail, the character has an exact position.
Resources have positions.
People have positions.
Objects have positions.
The world is divided into 1-meter tiles, and you can actually move through them.
If berries are growing on another tile, you need to move to where those berries are to interact with them.
If another person walks through the area, you can see that person moving through the same physical space.
And objects can now persist at exact positions.
If I leave an axe on a particular tile and walk away, the axe stays there.
Another player can arrive later.
They can see it.
They can pick it up.
The game does not quietly return it to my inventory because I changed screens.
It exists there.
Resources follow the same principle.
If I gather all the berries growing at a location, those berries are depleted for everyone.
Another player arriving afterward does not receive a personal fresh copy of the berry bush.
They see the consequences of what happened before they arrived.
Depending on the resource, it may eventually replenish.
Until then:
someone got there first.
This is one of the ideas we want to carry throughout the entire game.
Players should be able to leave the world different from how they found it.
By this point, many other systems were beginning to grow around the physical world too.
Objects can have ownership.
That sounds simple until you begin asking what ownership actually means inside a simulation.
Can someone take something that belongs to you?
Can they claim it belongs to them?
Can ownership records be forged?
Can somebody lie about where an object came from?
Who knows it was stolen?
Who witnessed the theft?
What does an NPC remember?
Who did that NPC tell?
Can information travel with them?
Those questions led us into systems involving things like:
ownership, theft, lying, forgery, crime, NPC behavior, information propagation, and NPC memory.
NPCs are also beginning to participate in the world themselves.
They can travel.
Gather.
Encounter people.
Learn information.
Remember information.
And eventually act based on what they know rather than possessing magical global knowledge about everything happening in the game.
The physical world gives all of those systems somewhere to happen.
Once physical space and persistent objects existed, the next question became obvious:
What happens when somebody wants to stay?
Players can begin claiming land.
That opens the door to construction.
A character might begin with a very simple shelter.
Over time, that can become a home.
Then perhaps a workshop.
Storage.
Additional rooms.
Another structure.
Eventually a homestead.
And generations later, potentially something much larger.
Property in Hive Legacies is intended to exist inside the same physical world as everything else.
It isn't simply:
Player Housing Instance #8237.
It occupies space.
It is somewhere.
Other things are around it.
The construction interface began expanding from there.
Buildings are not intended to simply appear because the player purchased a “House Level 2” upgrade.
Construction requires actual space and eventually connects to materials, labor, knowledge, terrain, ownership, and the other systems already being built.
What can you build?
Where can you build it?
What materials are available?
Who owns the land?
How large is the structure?
What physically fits there?
All of those questions become possible because the game already understands where things are.
The latest major step in this progression was being able to actually enter a building.
That gives us another layer of persistent physical space.
You can place possessions inside.
Objects can remain there as storage.
The building becomes more than an icon on the map.
And interiors create some interesting gameplay consequences.
Consider experimentation.
If you discover something valuable while openly experimenting beside a road, somebody may potentially observe what you are doing.
But what happens when you build a workshop, walk inside, close yourself away from everyone else, and perform the same experiment privately?
Suddenly architecture interacts with knowledge.
Privacy matters.
Workshops matter.
Storage matters.
Property matters.
The systems begin connecting again.
And that is the part of Hive Legacies we are most interested in.
This development process has changed the game visually quite a bit.
But the graphical progression is not really the important part.
The major progress has been moving from:
menus representing actions
to:
characters performing actions somewhere
to:
characters occupying a shared persistent world where objects, resources, people, knowledge, and consequences have locations.
That foundation lets seemingly unrelated systems begin interacting.
A berry bush is not just a gathering button.
It exists somewhere.
Someone can gather from it.
It can become depleted.
Another player can arrive too late.
That player might need food.
They might travel somewhere else.
They might meet someone on the road.
The person they meet might sell berries.
Or rob them.
Or tell them about another location.
That information might be true.
It might be a lie.
And an NPC witnessing some part of that interaction might remember what happened and carry that information somewhere else.
None of those individual systems are especially interesting because they have giant numbers attached to them.
They become interesting because they affect one another.
Hive Legacies is still extremely early.
There is a huge amount of work ahead.
The interfaces will change.
The maps will change.
Art will improve.
Systems will be rebuilt.
Balance will probably be wrong repeatedly.
Some ideas we currently love will almost certainly fail once people start actually interacting with them.
But going back through these screenshots makes the direction much easier to see.
We started with a few persistent menus.
Then gave the character a world.
Then gave the world distance.
Then gave locations resources.
Then gave those resources persistence.
Then gave characters exact positions.
Then gave objects exact positions.
Then allowed players to change what future players would find.
Then began building ownership, crime, NPC behavior, property, construction, and private spaces around that foundation.
And we are still at the beginning.
That may ultimately be the easiest way to explain what we are trying to build.
If you take something...
it isn't there anymore.
If you leave something...
someone else can find it.
If you exhaust something...
someone else can discover that it is gone.
If you build something...
it occupies part of the world.
If someone sees you do something...
they may remember.
And eventually, when your character is long dead, some of the things they changed may still remain.
That is where the “Legacies” part begins.
More soon.
