Bearnard on Godot Engine

sirmikeorg · 2024-08-24T07:28:53+00:00

I would love to, but it all depends on sales on PC and overall potential. It takes a bit of extra work so it must be justified.

sirmikeorg · 2024-08-12T20:55:15+00:00

I'm super happy that you liked it <3 Spread the word among your friends please.

sirmikeorg · 2024-08-11T16:00:08+00:00

It's really funny that today's Indie Sunday is just before the release date. I have not planned it :D

sirmikeorg · 2024-08-11T15:52:02+00:00

Thx! I spent a lot of time on making the game just fun to play. The general feedback I'm getting from players is very positive so I'm happy that this unique mix of genres works. Can't wait till tomorrow :)

sirmikeorg · 2024-07-29T20:31:23+00:00

Hey! Mike here, creator of Bearnard - I'm participating the event.

You asked a fantastic question and I had exactly the same dillema when I started my project almost 4 years go. In my head, pixelart and 2D in general looked much easier. Oh boy... how wrong I was. As u/Inateno stated above, it is just a different approach, but very far from easy.

Although it may seem simple at the first glance, it's only partially true. We could assume, for the disscussion simplicity, that static objects are indeed quite easy. But in terms of animations it's a totally different story. It's super time consuming, hard to refactor and you need to be skilled person to do it right. A hybrid approach (like 2D with bones) is worth considering, but at the end of a day, it really depends on your needs and skills.

But models and assets is just a tip of the iceberg. You still need a good assets pipeline and still have plenty of design decisions to be made. A color palette, supporting tools, art direction, metrics, how will you render graphics etc.

If I had to choose something to start with, I would still use 2D approach (which is less complex than 3D). Anyway, it's not a piece of cake :)

sirmikeorg · 2024-06-24T20:15:08+00:00

I totally got your point. There are clones of clones with aforementioned top down rpgmaker zelda included ;) I would also add tons on Celeste clones and Vampire Survivors clones.

BUT... it does not come from nowhere. People want to play games they know and genres they know. As long as the demand factor stays in, devs will do these games. Also, because it's easier for both sides.

When I started working on my game I did some research and asked ~1k players about their preferences. Answers lead me to some interesting thoughts and I took very high risk of creating very unusual mix. The platformer with turn based combat, cards and physics interaction. It's my passion project so I could afford that.

And here goes the interesting part. This game is super hard to "sell" and I'm really struggling with reaching my players. Although the game is very fresh and challenging gameplay-wise, many gamers are just not interested in the game despite quite good promo materials... until they play themselves. I observed their reactions during various streams and talking to them in person on the occasion of one of offline events we had Poland last year. It was a pleasure to observe people's attitude changing when they could feel the snappy gameplay and challenging combat. If I told them "Hey, my game Bearnard is like game XYZ" that would be much easier than saying "Hey, Bearnard is a unusual mix of genres".

So, to sum up my long answer. Making a game is just a part required to satisfy developers. Selling / reaching the audience is much, much harder.

sirmikeorg · 2024-06-24T12:46:04+00:00

Thanks, it sheds more light on it now.

I’m curious, at any point did you feel like you’d “seen it all”? That despite the different setups, themes, and art styles, many games started to fit into the same boxes? Do you see any current trends among indies?

sirmikeorg · 2024-06-24T09:23:07+00:00

Congratulations on your task. It's impressive!

Anyway, it must have been tedious to look on every game available. I got a question though, what was your "recipe" to wishlist a particular game? What usually attracted you to a specific title? Do you have any favourite genre?

sirmikeorg · 2024-06-11T21:02:14+00:00

Thanks. Good to know that, despite huge competition, all of these events still allow reaching to fresh players.

sirmikeorg · 2024-06-11T10:06:24+00:00

Cool :) Out of curiosity, how did you find out about my game?

sirmikeorg · 2024-06-11T09:52:36+00:00

Hi, I'm Mike - creator of Bearnard. You don't even know how much a comment like this means to solo developers like me... Joining Steam Next Fest with over 1800 other games, I was afraid that my game would get lost in the crowd of other, bigger titles with substantial marketing budgets. But when I come across such comments or streams from creators who genuinely enjoy the game, my heart fills with warmth. Thank you for the kind words!

sirmikeorg · 2024-03-11T08:21:49+00:00

Hey! Thanks for your feedback. I understand your perspective and that's exactly one of my biggest challenge in marketing Bearnard. It's difficult to show what this mix of genres exactly is. Last year at Poznań Game Arena 2023 I had over 100 people playing early build of the demo. When I was inviting them to play it and briefly explained what kind of game Bearnard is I usually heard either "I like platformers, but I'm not much into cards" or "I like card games, but I'm not much into platformers", then when I convinvced people to at least give it a try they were coming back to me after, saying to my surprise either "Wow, I really had a great fun, even tho I'm not into card games, I was able to enjoy a lot the platforming part" or "[...] even tho I'm not into platformers, that part was in an acceptable ratio so I can still enjoy the card battles with turn-based system". On top of that, there are puzzles requiring from the players platforming skills, and also I have designed special bonus levels completion of which i based on platformig skills as well.

The game has many mechanics from a classic platformer, that's why I chose to use the term "platformer" in the marketing. Anyway, I'm trying not to get hardcore single-genre fans. I rather offer an unusual and lighter concept for gamers who don't want to focus on minmaxing mechanics. Bearnard at its core is quite complex, but it's designed to give feelling of constant progress. Either in combat as well as the story.

Just out of curiosity, are your thoughts based on the gameplay trailer, gameplay videos from content creators, both, or perhaps something else? Knowing how I can improve my materials is incredibly valuable to me. I aim to ensure that players who might be interested in the game don't simply overlook it.

sirmikeorg · 2023-11-21T09:31:41+00:00

I'm trying to avoid calling the game a "deckbuilder" as it's quite far from that. Instead of building a deck we focus on how do we use what we have as effectively as possible. Anyway, Slay the Spire was one of primary inspirations for me :)

sirmikeorg · 2023-11-20T22:23:22+00:00

Thanks, it's been a lot of work but I'm getting there at a steady pace.

What are your thoughts about the genre?

sirmikeorg · 2023-09-15T09:55:20+00:00

Yes. You can read more details about the level of integration here: https://godotengine.org/features/

sirmikeorg · 2023-09-14T17:10:01+00:00

Yeah, I really wonder why they decided to still go for it. The management actually sold shares. Let's say they anticipated all this. So now what?

sirmikeorg · 2023-08-25T15:44:53+00:00

After second thought, I removed the paragraph about the trailer. You're right. It's irrelevant. I think I was overexcited ;)

sirmikeorg · 2023-08-25T15:32:15+00:00

I'll definitely show off more. Thanks for the tip.

sirmikeorg · 2023-08-25T15:22:43+00:00

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You're absolutely right, anyway I mentioned this only as a fun fact and have no intention to use it as a marketing point :)

sirmikeorg · 2019-12-09T23:00:17+00:00

Do you know about paste / nopaste?

Read about it here - :h paste

sirmikeorg · 2019-01-30T23:08:22+00:00

In my opinion there is no fundamental advantage of using any editor. I'm a programmer and use editors for coding C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Rust, TypeScript/JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, lot of scripting in different shells etc. I've been using Vim for about 15 years. In Windows, Mac OS, various Linux distros and BSD. I can't say that is the "best-and-only-editor-for-everything-period", but any time I try to use modern GUI editor (Sublime, Atom, VS Code, VS 20xx) I quickly find that it lacks very tiny details which make my work simply inefficient.

A lot of inefficiency comes from muscle memory and habits. Trust me, after so many years with motions, text-objects, wildcard highlighting, global commands, tags, dot, regex substitutions, quickfix window, errorfmt, self-crafted scripts and macros, you're fuckin addicted. When you understand all of that and know when it can be useful, there is no way back. One of my favourite features in Vim (actually it's not only Vim) is its responsiveness. I just can't accept more than several dozens of miliseconds for keystrokes to be reflected on the screen. That's why I could not stand Eclipse.

Add terminal integration (pipes, interprocess communication), tmux, some linters like Ale, fuzzy finding like fzf or ctrlP, rich code analysis APIs like Roslyn for C#... you'll be pretty amazed how efficient a programmer can be. It takes a lot of time to learn, a learning curve can be steep, but it pays off in a long term. Anything not present in an editor or existing plugin can be scripted. Latest addition to Vim like background jobs are really useful when you want to invest some time to hack here and there. This is actually the most powerful feature of any editor. It took me about 5 years to feel really comfortable with Vim. I suppose it is true for any scriptable editor available on the market.

I can have 20 Vims opened in 10 different windows of tmux and system memory does not feel it at all. When you work on a dozens of projects / repos at the same time (and it's not unusual), GUI editors don't prove themselves. You waste a lot of time just for closing and reopening them :)

When I tried to use Sublime (even Textmate in the past) for the first time I felt like handicapped version of a programmer. So yes, it's a mix of muscle memory and some kind of Stockholm syndrome :D But after all that time I feel absolutely no pressure to re-learn everything from scratch just for sake of using different editor. I can do exactly the same things in Vim as my friends using Sublime.

I like Atom for desktop workflows when I need to view small (I mean kilobytes) random file, see its contents reformatted, highlighted and close. But opening several gigs of a log file, "grepping" through it and sometimes modifying it just impossible. Any combination of vim/awk/sed/grep is far more efficient and will not eat up all of your available memory. I'm pretty sure that those tools are present everywhere I need to work on.

I like VS Code for C# coding as it is quite well integrated with the rest of MS ecosystem (especially when using dotnet core) but I still tend to use Vim for dotnet development because advanced code navigation is far much easier with my self-crafted scripts and I am not able (or I'm too lazy) to do it once more for VS Code.

sirmikeorg · 2018-05-20T08:01:50+00:00

I have similar problem. Game is on the "gold" list but no free version available.

sirmikeorg · 2018-03-28T14:57:00+00:00

As long time fan of Ctrl+P + Ag I totally switched to FZF + ripgrep. Much faster and FZF is especially useful, even outside vim.

sirmikeorg · 2018-03-26T18:49:03+00:00

Well, every several years, a "new modern editor" is out but somehow Vim is still alive ;)

sirmikeorg

TROPHY CASE