[RELEASE] The Bear's Black Heart

[Abban]

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.

[Bobby B]

yeah me too, recorded loads of process gifs and vids. Sore this morn, but back at it!! Now on to the next game

[Patrick R]

At a certain point I wasn't sure if I had reached the "end" or not, it felt like I was on week 9 forever and no NPCs were showing up. The presentation of this is really great.

[Bobby B]

1 hour ago, Patrick R said:

At a certain point I wasn't sure if I had reached the "end" or not, it felt like I was on week 9 forever and no NPCs were showing up. The presentation of this is really great.

Yeah little bear footprints would be a good way to see if you have been somewhere before maybe?

[Patrick R]

Oh, it's possible to backtrack? I had a completely different idea about the structure of this game.

 

[Bobby B]

1 minute ago, Patrick R said:

Oh, it's possible to backtrack? I had a completely different idea about the structure of this game.

 

No you can't backtrack but I still get lost!! (designer not developer here)

[Abban]

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

[Bobby B]

Wowzers...this being our first game and all I'm blown away by seeing two gameplay vids already:

https://bigbad.itch.io/the-bears-black-heart

And yep, great insight from the players: We need to make the NPC's appear larger on the text options screens.

[Abban]

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