Echoes of the Hive — Back in Development 🚀

Development on Echoes of the Hive restarted last month after a short pause. The past four weeks have been intense — gutting old systems, fixing years' worth of bugs, setting up the engine for the game it deserves to be.

Here's what changed.

🧹 The Big Bug Hunt

We swept the entire bug tracker and fixed 33 issues in a single pass. Not the flashy stuff — the kind of bugs that make a game feel bad:

• UI rebuilding every single frame instead of only on data change

• Camera scrolling outside the world boundary

• AI chase distances hardcoded (and way too aggressive)

• Projectiles destroyed by background tiles

• Frame rate cap set to 1000 — your GPU did not appreciate that

All fixed. Game already feels snappier.

🏗️ Rewriting the Foundation

The codebase grew organically over time — systems tangled together, hard to change without breaking something else. Midway through a full Event-Driven Architecture overhaul that decouples everything into clean, independent systems.

7 phases planned, all 7 merged. Engine now has:

• Event bus so systems talk through messages, not direct references

• Clean input handling decoupled from the player character

• Tiles, items, saves, and world data as independent modules

• Assembly definitions — Unity compiles only what changed, cutting iteration time

For players: means fewer crashes, faster loads, and a foundation we can build on confidently.

⚡ Performance Wins

Chased down every hotspot costing frames:

• Coroutines spawning new objects every run → now share a global cache

• GetComponent calls in Update loops → cached at startup

• Camera lookups cached, object pooling introduced for effects

• Tools and weapons now actually appear in the player's hands when equipped

Smoother gameplay, less GC stutter, better battery life.

📋 Where We Stand

🗺️ What's Next

• Chat system rebuild — moving to proper canvas UI

• Magic system — spells that interact with weapons and equipment

• Boss fight — Executioner fight in, more on the way

• Performance audit — ongoing optimisation pass

💬 Follow Along

Development updates will post here on Steam and Itch as we hit milestones.

Questions? Feedback? Drop a comment. We're reading everything.

— Leon Twemlow