Abban

Hi all, Game idea So the game is a rogue like about a bear, it snuffled its way into a load of coffee and has insomnia so it can’t hibernate and has to travel around the forest looking for food to keep it going over the winter. As it gets colder food become harder to find and the player must make white/black choices in order to survive. Will they eat these weird mushrooms they found? Will they try catch a fish through ice etc? Bad choices turn the bears heart slowly darker as it becomes more and more feral. Every time a player makes a choice it moves to the next day. The hunger meter goes up constantly so the earlier the player makes their choice the less hunger they have the next day. If a player doesn’t like the look of a choice they can look for more. The game can end 3 ways, the player starves, the player goes feral or the player lasts through until Spring. Challenges I’ve never done anything procedural before and I want to use this as a chance to explore various methods of building decent playable systems that are somewhat random. Generating a 2D terrain with a path for the bear to travel along, I’m not sure if I’ll make it branch or not but branching would be a cool thing to add. Ensuring the hunger meter is balanced. If the winter is say 30–50 days long the amount hunger increases and the amount of food to be found will be important. Its also vital to not put too much food around in order to force the player into making a few bad choices. Choice generator. I’m planning these to be structured like random events you come across in open world games. First thing I’m going to get working is the terrain generator then I’ll move on to the other challenges. Team So theres 2 of us working on this (Abban and Bob), I’m doing the development and Bob is doing the illustration.

Just came here to post that! I hope he plays a load more of our stuff!

Music is by this guy: http://www.brokeforfree.com/

Just heard Jake mention it on the podcast! For people wondering here's the itch page stats: Before that video I think we had 170 installs. The install rate from YouTube views is <1%. It also bumped the game onto the most popular list which got it some more hits. It looks like its going to bottom out at a few hundred a day for the next few months. This week has been very surreal, for the last year I've been extremely stressed about moving from my paid profession (web development) into the great unknown of game dev and even though its a one off this is a huge confidence boost. I feel like I can add Game Developer onto my email signature now.

What a cool idea! I liked this a lot. Theres a bug when you sneak into the cellar early on, the door says locked but it opens to an empty room after you click it a couple of times.

Its published https://bigbad.itch.io/the-bears-black-heart Dev Log here https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/11170-dev-log-the-bears-black-heart/ Could probably subtitle it Abban's sore arse, Bob and I have been sitting at our desks all day tweaking and putting on final touches. I have a ton of dev stuff to write about but its after 12 here now and we're both absolutely exhausted.

I cheated and uploaded a v1.1.0 where I fixed a bunch of the usability and balancing issues.

Cheers Ben! The balancing is all over the place atm, because we only started writing that content yesterday. Hooking it all up took up most of the day and I only got to actually play it properly after we submitted. There's a decent little game in there that I still need to draw out. For example I need to force the player into making those bad choices begrudgingly. We've been slowly working on Big Bad Spanish for the last year (although Bobby had been designing it for years before that). I'm pretty new to game dev and I've slowly been building the game while learning how all this stuff works. The reason the site looks so good is because thats our original bread and butter, we have a web design/development background. It feels like I learned more in the last 2 weeks than the last 2 years before.

So yeah, the pacing can be bad. It loads different rooms at random when you walk through a door and only one of those is a room where you meet an NPC. I originally planned to add some functionality to make sure you never go too long without an opportunity to progress but ran out of time. Its something I'll fix when I can bear (ha) to look at the code again. I also need to fix the rewards and penalties from the dialogues. You need to get less food from them and it needs to be clearer whats good and whats bad. Basically I want to force you into begrudging bad decisions, and the blacker the heart gets the more it forces that upon you. I'll start balancing that stuff when I've slept for another 20 or so hours

I just want to say thanks to everyone here for the feedback and emotional support over the last couple of weeks. I've never done anything like this before and the amount I learned is incredible. The focus that comes from not having time to make and not second guess decisions really pushes things along. I'm going to add the last dev diary thing tomorrow because the amount of stuff I added over the last 2 days probably equalled the wok from the 2 weeks before. Also, congratulations to everyone else who got through it! Bed time.

We have a finished build! I want to run a few tests of the balancing then I'll be back. Sometimes the bear farts.

Joe Duffy already is a visual novel! I farted in his face once, its my claim to fame. Dev update coming in the morning. I'm too exhausted to write.

Hooked up winter sprites Scene View I also discovered that theres a weird bug on the path generator where sometimes a single tile isn't spawning. I probably won't have time to fix this.

Simpler the better, I'm not going to have time for any AI or complicated animation. But a hole where there can be various items or creatures inside is perfect!

Dev Log - T minus 4 days So today I populated the rooms with food and hooked up the hunger meter. I also changed the terrain generator a little. Its now creating a mesh the size of the bounds instead of separate tiles. The benefit of this is its now creating a thousand or so less sprite than it was. I can add a 3D collider onto the mesh too if I want to add a particle collider that used collision like rain or snow. The items all get horizontally aligned in the Scene screenshot but its not noticeable in the game view so I think its OK. The only system left to build now is the status effects, then its on to balancing and testing and tweaking. Crowdsourcing So I need ideas for the following: Events Status Effects Events are things the bear will find in the woods and statuses are the effects applied to the bear depending on the choice they make at that event. For example the bear might find a pot and you can choose to eat the contents or smash it. The pot might be full of honey so if you eat it you get a hunger bonus. If you smash it the honey could stick to your feet causing you to move slower. On the other hand the pot might be full of bees so if you eat it you get stomach ache and if you smash it you get stung (both bad). I'm going to need around 30-50 events so if you have any ideas please post them as I think this is going to end up being the hardest part of the entire jam for me.

I have paid work today so just posting a couple of screens of the new room generation with foliage that I wrote this morning. Next update will be tomorrow.

Peek a boo

If we finish this it'll be our first published game.

I love the art style, the run animation is quirky as hell too. He should quack as his feet land!

Dev Log - Day I don't even remember anymore Where to begin.. I took the weekend off because I was confident that we could finish this in time. Then yesterday I had a bit of a panic that we actually didn't have that much time so put a load of hours in and today I'm relaxed again. This is what I've built in the last 2 days. Choice/Dialogue The player will come across objects in the game in order to move to the next level they're going to have to pick one. I built these to work like dialogue choices. You read some text and are presented with options and can pick one or look for another. You then see the consequences of your choice. Each choice passes a week, so you're going to do 5 weeks of Autumn and 5 weeks of Winter and 5 weeks of something else. Each choice adds a status effect some of which will stack. I'm currently working on these statuses atm. They'll be stuff like exposing the timer in the hunger meter, moving faster or slower, getting hungrier faster or slower, fog of war etc. Choices are being loaded in from JSON which makes it handy to add new ones. I was thinking of using Twine or Yarn for it but I'm not sure yet. Hunger Meter The hunger meter is a timer, eating food will add to the timer but not above a max level. This will allow a bit of exploration if the player wants. Balancing I'm aiming to make a single play of the game last from 30-60 minutes. With 15 levels that means each level should take the player 2-4 minutes to get through. Tomorrow I'm going to work on the procedural generation of the terrain objects as that will be a nice break from working on systems. Frustration Sometimes I just want Unity to fuck off. Running into Unity bugs in the UI Layouts and stuff really sucks time away. For example did you know that the SceneManager.sceneLoaded event is called BEFORE the scene is finished loading? 3 hours debugging that today... I must check how many lines of code I've written since beginning this, here's a shot of the scripts I've written.

I sorted out some blend trees, now it looks a lot better

I love this model! How are you drawing the detail onto the mesh? I've been trying to figure that out for ages, drawing it onto the texture in Photoshop is really hit and miss.

OK, so I hooked some of this up to Unity. Its not perfect so I'll take a look at the Animation Controller in the morning when I'm not so tipsy.

This came out pretty well

Way ahead of you