Echoes of the Hive — Back in Development

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