Hey everyone. We're back.
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 | Count |
|---|---|
Pull requests merged since restart | 16 |
Commits | ~50 |
Bugs fixed | 33+ |
Systems decoupled | 7 major phases |
Assembly definitions created | 6 |
🗺️ 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