Abban

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.

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.

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.

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.