From icons to pixel pictures

Pixel Bees is a puzzle about pictures made of cubes: a strawberry, a rocket, a whale, a snowman. Bees fly around the picture and carry away the cubes of their colour. For that to work, each picture has to become a grid that is easy to read, fair and fun to clear.

Thirty simple pictures

We start from thirty flat, simple illustrations with clear shapes and few colours: food, animals and everyday things. Flat art matters here. A picture with soft shading would turn into hundreds of nearly identical colours.

Down to a grid

Each picture is scaled down to a small grid, from 16 by 16 up to 28 by 28 cells. The small grids make quick early levels; the big ones become the later, harder versions of the same picture.

Fewer colours

Every colour in a picture needs its own hives and bees, so the palette has to be small. We group similar colours together until only a handful are left, then push colours that are too close apart in lightness, so you can always tell two hives apart at a glance. The white background is dropped and single stray pixels are cleaned up.

Exactly enough bees

When a level is built, the number of bees of each colour matches the number of cubes of that colour exactly. The puzzle is in the order: only the front hive of each column can fly, and bees with work left over wait in a small number of slots. A solver checks that every level can be cleared, and the levels are sorted by how often a casual player wins.

A golden finish

Clear the last cube and the picture re-forms in shining honey gold before it joins your gallery: a small reward that makes you want to clear the next one.